the latest review

“[T]urns the executive-heavy office-help book formula on its head . . . Like a pin-wielding kid in a balloon shop, Hustad uses her insightful little book to burst workplace-attitude myths.” —Las Vegas Business Press

P.S. If anyone’s wondering why I’m anal and put the [T] in brackets, it’s because in the actual review, the “t” is lower-case, and by the standards of Stephen McNabb (hello, Stephen!), just willy-nilly elevating a lower-case “t” to a capital “T” because that better served my purpose here would be wrong in every conceivable sense. Integrity, man. Or maybe it simply illustrates that what you learn on your first job stays. with. you.

Dodging the Great Failure Army

The most enjoyable aspect of book publicity is that each interviewer picks up a different thread of your argument. Sometimes your answer involves making explicit a point the book only implies. And sometimes you’re led to say something you were entirely too squeamish to state before. As in the interview below, in which I essentially admit that what prompted HTBU was the fact that some of my friends were on the dusty road to loserdom:

“Megan Hustad, a native Minnesotan and University of Minnesota alumna, first turned to ’success literature’ (self-help books on jobs and business leadership) when she noticed diverging career trajectories among her peers: Some had plateaued, some had switched industries and others were thriving. ‘It wasn’t a matter of intelligence or capability at all,’ Hustad said. ‘I really started trying to dissect where are things going wrong for people.’ So she launched her own investigation, eventually publishing . . . a sharp, witty book brimming with advice for young people on how to manage the demands of the modern workplace.”

Needless to say, I was gripped by the fear that I was the biggest loser of them all. Full feature by the lovely and talented Megan Doll, in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune, here.

New York Times Book Review

Last week I was on an airplane and needed to visit the bathroom. I clambered over my seatmates, up the aisle, and pushed open the lavatory door. A woman — a dignified older woman, dressed in white, topped by a floppy white church hat — was inside, pulling up her underwear. Oh! I apologized and let the door shut, embarrassed for the both of us. A couple in the bulkhead row mustered watery smiles in sympathy. The older woman emerged and shot me a look. “There’s a sign!” she said, indicating the VACANT / OCCUPIED window that had, when I’d approached, indeed read VACANT. She walked off, uninterested in any reply.

How I felt right at that moment is similar to how I felt upon reading Alexandra Jacobs’s review of How to Be Useful in this Sunday’s New York Times. A critical review I can handle — hey, I’m an anxious, middle-class striver from the Midwest; we love hearing of ways we might improve ourselves! But a review that doesn’t engage the book’s real premise is harder to process. People who don’t wrestle with what actually happened, be they an old lady who neglected to lock the bathroom door or an over-worked book critic…let’s just say they make life infinitely interesting.

All I’ll say in defense of HTBU is that I’m surprised it was read as evidence that I find careerism and the office “fundamentally boring.” I believe quite the opposite. I hope you’ll read the book and agree.

Chicago Tribune

How to Be Useful is an Editor’s Choice.