THE PATHFINDER:
How does your future look? What is the career for you? What kind of work would you enjoy doing while also making you feel like you have been doing something with your time? If these are some of the questions you have when you think about work then the book The Pathfinder is the book that has been created to help you answer such questions. Written by Nicholas Lore, founder of the organization Rockport Institute that helps aid people in finding their career or change into a new one, will give examples, tips, make you ask yourself questions, answering some for you, and many ways in the search for a new career.

READING A SELF HELP BOOK:
The Pathfinder is basically a self help book, one that is geared, and tag lined, “How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success”. That tag line gives all the information you would need to know about what this book is about without having to say much more. What it doesn’t tell you is that this book is not for everyone. Being that if it did say this book was meant for only people that haven’t decided what career they want while also being someone that is able to do something about getting a career, then it wouldn’t sell that well.
While reading this book I found that it wouldn’t really help me do anything about my career because I already knew what I want to do for a career, my problem is not knowing what how to go about getting hired to do the career that I want. The Pathfinder doesn’t tell me how to get what I want, which is actually a much larger and harder step in picking a career. At times the author Nicholas Lore mentions that you shouldn’t pick a career that would be too far fetched, like I know that I’m never going to be an astronaut, I’m past my prime age where I can learn, train, and be in shape for one, but I also know that if I wanted to be Mayor that is something that’s possible. Sure it would be difficult, it would take a lot of hard work, money, time, and much more I don’t know about, but it’s also something that can be done. So lets say that after reading this book I decided that I wanted to be Mayor, how do I go about making that happen? Don’t know and The Pathfinder don’t tell me.
What it does tell me is a lot of information that is, at least to me it was, common sense. Some examples, doing research on what you are looking for in a career, what kind of goals do you have, write down some questions you have about what you want or what you don’t know you want, what kind of things do you already enjoy doing, and much more similar information. Even when I was young I already knew about asking questions about what I wanted to do with a job, granted I wasn’t looking for a career but the questions I was asking myself are the same ones that are told be to asked in this book. Not only does this book give a lot of information that’s already known, it also goes against itself at times. There is one bit of information where Nicholas Lore is saying that to make a good choice you should do the research, ask questions, and think about what you would want but then later in the book he says if you don’t know just make it up.
However, the reason why I didn’t find this book helpful is that it don’t tell you that it’s only for certain people. Giving this book to someone that has a life where they can’t change the type of job they are doing because of means, maybe they have a family that takes up all their free time, or they don’t have the money to get into a school or course that would train them for the career they want, this book won’t help them, it will only allow them to realize that they can’t do what they want. As for the people that it will help, it will only help them as far as setting them on the path to figuring out what they might want to do in a career. The Pathfinder is a easy book to read, which I liked about it, but about half of the book repeats itself in telling the reader what to do, or it’s telling the reader information that is already common sense. Though it might be easy to read, the book will go just far enough in helping some readers realize that they want a career rather than a job or jobs, and it might help some narrow down what they want to do from a broad subject like working outdoors to maybe being a construction worker, but for anyone that already knows what kind of career or job they want to do, The Pathfinder won’t do much to help them go further with their knowledge.