Book Review: Things To Do…Before Your Career Disappears (iii)

Author: Tope Fasua, FCA

Date: May 2013

Price: N3000, Hard back (N5000)

Available on Amazon

Offline purchase: Wale (0703 327 9034)

Reviewed for Jarushub by:

Omotola Hakeem Abimbola

(Final Year Economics Student, OAU, Ile-Ife, Nigeria; abimbolatola@yahoo.com or abimstols@gmail.com)

Continued from parts 1 and 2

Divided into nine chapters and an exciting conclusion where one of Steve Jobs great speeches was reproduced, WHAT TO DO BEFORE YOUR CAREER is altogether a rich book. Rich in problems analysis and packed with innovative solutions, the book is a must read for every futuristic thinking person, especially of African descent. The first four chapters built the case for why many careers will disappear in the not too distant future while the next two focused on the Africa and her present and future challenges. Chapter seven answers the main question of the book, what do you do before your career disappears? The section offered advices on what individuals, households, firms, pressure groups and most especially the governments in Africa must do to effectively cope with the new realities. Careers will disappear, the effective machines of technology and globalization are already ensuring that, and there is nothing Africans who are currently poised to suffer most can do stop it. What are however needed are strategies to position the continent better, in order to cope effectively with the new economic society, Fasua offered quite a number of those strategies in his book.

So if you are a student, job seeker, business owner or a public office holder, this book is telling you to be mentally alert, to think multidimensionally; 3D as the writer himself puts it. It is telling you to be innovative and acquire more diverse skills as well as make use of them in order to be able to keep up with the speed of innovation in your career, line of business, and the competitive global society at large.

WHAT TO DO BEFORE YOUR CAREER DISAPPEARS is in many ways an unconventional book. Replete with stories from Europe, U.S.A and Africa and references to movies like Parental Control and The Other Guy. Don’t be surprised when you start coming across lots of “greek” and “gimmick” words like yeah and lol, which you don’t find normally in books. I believe it is just Fasua’s way of communicating in language the reader understands and get his/her attention. The book is not without its own fair share of weakness. It made too many references to some events and characters when the reader should have been let to infer or conclude. You also get to see a few typographical errors which I hope will be corrected in subsequent editions.

There is a chance the book might be mistaken as a mere pessimistic view of the future, a doomsday book written by an over-exposed doomsday preacher whose imaginations have gone to the extreme. Alas, what I see it as is a bold attempt to capture new realities that have been ignored for far too long, when what it really needed are honest public discussions to awaken the public. Like the writer himself concluded in the book, what the book is telling you to do is to, wake up!

This write up will be incomplete without me saying a big thank you to my egbon and mentor, Mr. Suraj Oyewale  who not only accommodated me for three nights and facilitated JarushubCC which opened me to a worldview of fresh ideas, but also gave me this treasure of a book. You are indeed an inspiration to our generation. May your tribe ever multiply.