Book Review: Own Your Work Journey

Reviewed by Toni Woodruff

An inspirational and practical guide to taking the journey to your best self

Edward D. Hess shares insight, advice, and workshops to help you navigate the complex and winding path of your life journey. Everyone wants to succeed, but in changing times and with your specific goals, what does success even look like? 

Own Your Work Journey is a short book, but it’s packed with hours of actionable tasks to get you moving forward and better understanding the path you’re on. It’s inspirational but patient, practical but spiritual, slim but full. 

This book has a unique focus too. With the advent of even more groundbreaking smart technology, the business world is being forced to adjust daily. Both as an employer and as an employee, how do you stay valuable and desired? The answer: There are plenty of them.

Hess unpacks the myriad ways that you can do your job and live your life in only the way that you can. It champions uniqueness, ingenuity, personal relationships, quiet egos, and more. 

The quiet ego section is one of my favorites. It stands against the ideals of yesteryear and asks you pointed questions that help show you that being open-minded and brave enough to be wrong is more important to life and to business than confidence ever was. 

In addition to sharing insight that’s backed by a large bibliography, Hess also provides a number of workshop questions and journal prompts that make this book as interactive as it is informative. With all of these prompts, I could easily see it as a text to work together with a business class. 

However, the business aspects of this book are a bit quieter than a title like Own Your Work Journey would imply. It’s a personal improvement book that can be applied to every aspect of your life, including your work. While it’s nice that it’s so relevant in so many ways, there were times in here where I wish we focused more on work and climbing the ladder in business.

The journal prompts have a practical and important role in this book, but there are just so many of them. The large amount of exercises is good from a class-supplement standpoint, but the journaling might take up almost as much time to complete as reading the book does to read. I could have used more research in here over the requests for more time-consuming prompts.

Own Your Work Journey is a helpful book with a lot of real-life application. Readers who want to get the most of their advantages as a human over AI will gain much from the unique angles taken herein.

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