Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams Paperback – March 6, 2007

Firstly, this book is the type where you read the first portion to help get to know yourself, and then you can just read the remaining sections that apply to you. So if you don't get through whole books easily, you don't have to.It was helpful to me because it helped organize myself... not like de-clutter necessarily, but it validated my need to have things around at easy reach, and that I don't need to feel like a failure when I don't *complete* something. For some of us our minds need to explore, or prove we can do something to a certain level, or just get our feet wet, or whatever it is you "get out of it". It's not WRONG to not pick one thing and devote your life to it like society says. That's just how *some* people are, while others of us get our satisfaction and needs met in other ways. If you're tired of hearing "when are you going to get a real job?" or settle down, or "oh, you quit__(insert hobby or job here)__, huh?" and you feel guilty for not sticking with things, you NEED this book. It will pat you on the head and tell you there's nothing wrong with you and give you confidence and tools to work with your personality style the best you can. And it's not just feel-good, it helps you get to know yourself and gives you concrete ideas of how to get along better in a world where everything is supposed to be cookie-cutter and you're not a stiff gingerbread man, lol, you want to be moldable dough that will never be baked into one shape forever! :-D

While I would not recommend this book to most (that is, I wouldn't dive in without being sure I was, or cared for, a member of the target audience), it has proven endlessly useful for a Scanner who does well to track down other Scanners. For me, the stories that Barbara Sher shares strike more than a strong chord, and she does well to put to words the more unsettling and inspiring points of Scanner life.I found the second part of the book in which Sher outlines nine archetypal kinds of Scanner of particular importance, if only because it is where she is at her most detailed and prescriptive. Early on in the section she shares how she had "never met a Scanner who was only one type", which, to me, frames the descriptions that follow as common challenges and pitfalls she has troubleshot in the past, rather than as personality profiles to live up to. This, and other little touches, help lend the book a certain mindfulness to balance out the exuberance you come to expect from the Scanner author.I cannot say how the ideas in Refuse to Choose will sit with a reader who has not already done the amount of thinking about the topic that I had in the years leading up to reading this book, but it does well to confirm what many might have not yet put into words. In the end, after all, it's this act of putting these things into words (among many other things outlined within) that will make the Scanner's finishing process easier, whether it's "bringing in a buddy" on our projects or in building that daybook we can keep coming back to.All I want to add is that I would love to see the ideas in Refuse to Choose expanded on in the years to come to reach a wider Scanner audience. My Generation Y needs another Barbara Sher!

I’ve long associated with being a Renaissance person, but I’ve often struggled with why I have so many interests, yet cannot seem to stay focused on any one interest very long. Barbara Sher helped me better understand the differences in the types of Scanners (her word for what I would call a Renaissance person) and which Scanner type I was.I gave this four stars and would gladly go a bit higher, but I don’t think it is a five-star book. The missing piece is more questions to help you figure out exactly which category you best fit into. For me this was not too difficult, though I could see bits of myself in all of them, but I would really have appreciated a quiz and a chart to better classify which categories I fit into. Even so, the questions at the beginning of each chapter do help with this, I just wish it went a bit further.

Dear Friends: I have been a big fan of Barbara Sher's work since her first book on managing multiple interests and careers, "Wishcraft," came out. "Wishcraft" made a huge difference in my life. "Refuse to Choose!" picks up where "Wishcraft" left off, and offers additional thoughts on assembling all of your prized projects and careers into a framework where you can pursue them all.I worked as a career counselor at one time, so I believe that I can give an informed opinion on books about managing multiple careers.I'm a scanner -- a Sybil scanner, to use Sher's classification scheme -- and I had spent years futilely trying to "specialize" and being mocked for having multiple interests, and being admonished to "pick one or two.""Refuse to Choose!" has been very helpful to me, as I am trying to organize my multiple interests, and my (at least) four careers into a framework where I can be creative in each career and special interest for the next twenty years.I read the criticisms of the book with some puzzlement -- they seem to have been written mostly by people who favor specialization and suppressing some interests in favor of completing a few projects. It's like reading reviews of a book on wine tasting by people who don't drink at all.I would urge interested readers to examine the sample text of the book that Amazon presents and see for yourselves what a helpful book it is. Don't be fooled by the deceptively simple language Sher uses -- many of her insights into "scanners" are quite profound.I have given several copies of the book to friends who are also "scanners."