Nobody Cares About Your Career

She worked hand-in-hand with a founder who was a lightning rod for controversy—OK, for stepping in it. She grew a chaotic company (Vanity Fair called it a “pirate ship”) housed over a dentist’s office outside of Boston that published giveaway papers into a juggernaut with more than 5 billion monthly video views and 225 million followers valued at 550 million dollars. Erika Ayers Badan calls herself a “token CEO”, the rare female employee in the highest rank of a bro-roar sports and new media culture.

She’s also a massive student of work: how to do it, how to be effective at it, how to get noticed, how to crush it, how to figure out what you love and do it as a job. She’s figured it out, after big marketing jobs in large traditional corporations like Microsoft and AOL, for herself; she’s figured it out for friends; she figured it out for the thousands of people who listened to her Barstool podcast, “Token CEO” every week. And in this book, she’s figuring it out for everybody else.

With the verve and motivation of books like You Are A Badass and the smart, specific ideas of titles like Atomic Habits, Nobody Cares About Your Career is a real playbook. It’s about how work really works and how you can get work to work for you. It’s about thank you notes and thankless tasks, the energy in meetings and energy vampires, how to pick a boss and how to get a boss to pick you. It’s about being all in (but not bringing your whole self to work—some of you is better left at home) and becoming valuable to your workplace. It’s about participating—with your brain, your skills, your experience, and your willingness to pitch in and offer yourself up for something you may not even know how to do yet. It’s about making your own luck at work.

Nobody Cares About Your Career is for first-time job seekers who think no company will ever want them, people stuck in second or third jobs who don’t know how to move on to the next thing, people who have the job they thought was their brass ring but who discovered it’s not all that.