Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambition

by Harriet Rubin

Soloing has two "going it alone" and being "complete in yourself." . . . But you don't just leave--a company/a career/a paycheck--and cross over to a more satisfying life. There's more to it. There is a mysterious passage to be negotiated, a delicate transition required to go from alone-in-the-desert to complete-in-yourself. Harriet Rubin, bestselling author of The Machiavelli for Women, returns with inspiring advice for professionals dreaming of crossing over from a corporate world of prescribed boundaries to the limitless opportunities of soloing. She describes how people can do great things--things they would never be able to accomplish inside the corporate structure--when they manage or lead no one. As one successfully navigates the passage toward a truer sense of self that Rubin describes, four invaluable freedoms With insights as diverse as Henry David Thoreau's "I want to be sure the world doesn't change," and Michael Jordan's response to the "There's no 'I' in team,"--"That's right, but there is an 'I' in win,"--Rubin gives readers the chance to bring their dreams into alignment with reality.

Genres: Self Help, Business, Nonfiction

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1999

Reviews

[Roxanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambition with the hope that it would help me plan out how to transition from an unsatisfying full-time job to a freelance career. While Rubin has some good advice about following your passion, it ultimately wasn't useful in answering the questions I had, and because the book was published in 1999, some of the information came across as a bit dated.

Rubin spends much of the book discussing how to reinvent yourself and your identity outside of the corporate model, how to discover the work that truly inspires you, and how to generate the courage to pursue that work. While there's some great content here, it's not as useful to someone like me - I know my passions (writing, editing, teaching yoga and teaching writing), I just need to figure out how, financially, to build those passions into a viable career. In this area Rubin is lacking. The cover blurb notes that Rubin, a high-powered publishing executive for many years, now works with "leading CEOs" in her solo career, and this comes through in the content. Although Rubin strives to interview a wide variety of professionals in researching this book (including a master bonsai gardener and a corporate guy turned race car driver), her target audience is the dissatisfied exec looking to build a consulting career (and with a lot more cash in the bank than I have). For example, Rubin states that, when leaving your corporate job, you should be able to negotiate a retainer, exit package, or continued Cobra health insurance, which just sounds laughable to any average cubicle jockey. In general, employees in the lower echelons of the corporate world just don't have that kind of bargaining power, and Rubin doesn't seem to know it.

Rubin states repeatedly that a soloist can make far more on her own than her previous corporate salary, and with only a few clients, but Rubin never addresses the practical concerns of how to identify and market yourself to your client base and find those lucrative clients. As a yoga teacher, I guess "clients" in this case would mean starting my own yoga studio and identifying private clients, but that's not as feasible for a brand-new teacher just starting out when there are plenty of more experienced yoga teachers around. I have some ideas about looking for clients as a writer, but I don't really know where to start as an editor. Either way, making ends meet just doesn't seem possible, letting alone turning a profit, and how do you get through the months or years of financial struggle to get to the point where the ends do meet? I did appreciate some of the practical information Rubin provides - how to calculate expected business expenses and the income needed to pay the bills, what legal advice and insurance you should invest in. I also liked Rubin's discussion of proposals, which will be directly useful to me as a writer/editor and possibly also as a yoga teacher (proposals could be useful if I do want to start my own studio, if I want to propose a special workshop or class, if I want to sell myself to a corporate client that wants to offer yoga to its employees, as a few examples). But overall I wanted more on the practical side of things.

Rubin spends a long chapter discussing how to set up and structure a website and what sort of content to post there, and here's where we see how far technology has come in the past 10+ years. No longer must you pay a web design firm to create a site for you (again, an expense the little folks can't really afford) now that there are plenty of websites that help you easily design a professional-looking personal site and blog for free. It's also cheap and easy to buy, register, and use your own personalized domain name. Rubin details the conversations she had with her web designer about how her site should be structured, and while it's interesting, most of this just isn't applicable anymore.

Overall, Rubin gives some great advice to the soloist, and the book is still valuable and worth reading. However, it didn't have everything I was hoping for, and I never really felt like I was the target audience.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few useful morsels and an interesting story of her journey from corporado to 'soloist' - but pretty wooly minded and way too generalized. Many other, better books in this category.

[Lauri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a must-read for anyone who is disatisfied with life in the coporate world. The author gives the reader the confidence and freedom to start thinking about working on working on one's own. Even if you just have the wildest far off dream of starting your own business you should read this book. Get out your pen and highlight important sections, dog-ear the pages, read it twice through then set it aside. But, don't let it get to far away from you, because this is a book that you can go back to time and again once you DO take the leap. It will provide some of the necessary information and insights and all of the pep talk.

[Stef Garvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea of projects is the thing I liked about this book the most. That is pursuing a career as a series of projects--opportunities to get paid for learning.

The idea is, by soloing, a person is able to change to meet existing market demands. I would really love to see if that bears true.

[Dave Haskins]

Business

[Sam Berner]

Read it a bit late in life - and changed the way I operate my business. Not for the faint-hearted or the rookies. If there were 10 stars, this book deserves it.

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on how to have passion in work.