Hate Your Job?

Just in time for college graduation comes a career guide for the smart liberal-arts grad who believes such guides are nothing more than a pile of self-help mush: "How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work," by Megan Hustad, 33, a history major at the University of Minnesota, and former book editor at Random House and Basic Books. 

"How to Be Useful" draws on a century's worth of career advice--from Andrew Carnegie and Dale Carnegie (not related) to Helen Gurley Brown and Stephen Covey. But Hustad's book is more than an I-read-this-so-you-won't-have-to exercise. She believes there is plenty of career gold in these mines, and she intersperses her readings with anecdotes from the contemporary workplace. Hustad spoke with NEWSWEEK's Daniel Gross about the clichés of the career canon, what it takes to get ahead in the "creative industries" and the delicate art of managing your first boss. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: So, who is the target audience?
Megan Hustad: Recent grads, twentysomething or older, who would normally never pick up a book of good advice. I wanted to stop these lessons from being lost to a whole subset of pretentious liberal-arts grads like I once was.

Why aren't they picking up career-advice books?
All this stuff is seen as tacky or intellectually suspect. There's this idea that if you're really clever you can take something artsy, like a 19th-century novel, or a short-story collection in translation, and if you're smart enough, you can find wisdom there and apply it to any situation. Also, people tend to overidentify with products they buy. There's a sense that a certain type of person reads a certain type of book. And lots of creative types think that these books aren't just for me.

You offer career advice for people seeking careers in industries like fashion, publishing, politics and technology. But aren't career paths in these industries chaotic and unpredictable, and hence difficult to plan. How does that work?
This book was inspired by my experiences in the creative industries. There's no benchmark in publishing, for example, that says if you hit certain targets by a certain date you'll get rewarded, like becoming managing director on Wall Street, or getting tenure as an academic. Instead, it's a total free for all. Which means that a lot of your success comes down to relationships and office politics and your personal skills. It's not how clever or how good you are, or how sparkling your prose is. Rather, if you're not someone who has ultimately presented himself as someone who higher-ups want to see succeed, you're not going to.

The book is structured as an intellectual history of career advice. Why did you take that approach?
I'm a history major, by biography and inclination. So that was fascinating to me. And I was curious to see which lessons held up over time, and how do different generations take the same core methods and apply them to their circumstances.