Book Review – Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose

Barbara Sher is a well-known speaker and author on personal growth topics. I don’t know how I missed her because I love reading self help books, but she is a classic author in the field. The title of this book captivated me – Refuse to Choose – Use all of your passions, interests and hobbies to create the life and career of your dreams. I have always wanted to major in everything and have a ton of hobbies and interests, so it sounded right up my alley.

Barbara calls the target audience of her book “scanners” which which she defines as a person wired to be interested in a wide variety of things. I strongly identified with this type of personality because I have always been interested in doing more things that I had time or space for. Sometimes it’s difficult to plan and write goals when you feel pulled in many different directions. The first section of the book outlines the features and challenges of living life as a scanner and talks about techniques and strategies that work well with the scanner brain. For example, to capture all the “great ideas” that fly by in my head, I have started using her scanner’s notebook. She describes how to map out each idea and add additional information about it. This can capture ideas that come and go all in one place. Some of those ideas will move into further planning steps, and some won’t and that’s okay. She emphasizes that it’s okay to chase a project or idea as far as it needs to go and not to be afraid to conclude things when their run their course, even if it’s not “finished.”

The second half of the book talks about the different way that scanners can organize their life plan to make room for multiple careers or interest. She breaks down different models of lives where people pursue multiple interests in different ways. Sometimes, a person will have two parallel careers. Other times a person will do work for quick income and then take time away to travel the world. Some people are well served working as an expert or consultant in different companies. She lists dozens of different ways to frame your life to make room for a wide range of interests and multiple roles. I realize that being an ASL interpreter is a perfect career for a scanner. You can travel and do it all over. You can freelance and make your own hours. Working at a college, I truly do feel like I get to major in everything. As Deaf students come and go with different majors, I get to listen in on class after class and learn a wide variety of topics.

One of the examples in the section on designing lifestyles was of a woman who balanced different artistic pursuits over different seasons of focus. I started using one of the suggestions for how to charting the threads of my different creative projects with post-it notes layed out on a page. I can map out the ebb and flow of the things I have been working on and see what I might have been neglecting recently.

I read this book very quickly from cover to cover. I notice the effect it’s had on how I think about my goal setting and how I structure my work schedule. I have use her framing to help balance my role as mother and small business woman as well as to add structure to my creative projects. If you have an eclectic array of interests in business or personal pursuits and sometimes have difficulty balancing the different threads of your life, this books is a good pick.