The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: the last career guide you’ll ever need by Daniel H. Pink and with art by Rob Ten Pas.

This is a manga-inspired graphic novel that is shelved with the career guides, and quite rightly - it's a useful book. I love it.

What I love about is its accessibility. It’s non-threatening, non-challenging, highly entertaining and has some real, but easy-to-understand wisdom to convey.

Johnny Bunko is what I think of as a low-level functionary. He’s so much like me at a younger age. He’s miserable in his job and his status at the bottom of the totem pole isn’t helping.

Saddled with another assignment that will mean another all-nighter for him, he says, “I can’t believe I have to re-check the numbers on every one of these statements .. what am I doing here? I’m bored .. I’m uninspired .. I feel like I’m wasting my life .. there has to be a better way!” (Is this beginning to sound like an info-mercial?)

He snaps open his chopsticks to begin eating his take-out sushi, a supernatural creature appears, floating in the air.

She says her name is Diana, and she’s a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Ariel. She’s got some news for Johnny: “The problem is, when it comes to work, you’re as clueless as a cucumber.” She tells Johnny she will appear each time he snaps open one of the six pairs of chopsticks he picked up at the sushi place down the street; each time she visits him, she’ll teach him one career lesson. Along the way, she offers him some advice that will help him in the here and now; part of the fun of the story is that, with Diana’s help, Johnny does get a plum (but tough) assignment: that’s how he learns about making excellent mistakes.

Lesson one: There is no plan.

Life is too complicated for that; things change, sometimes very rapidly.

While there is no plan, you still need to make smart career choices. You can choose to do something for instrumental reasons, because you hope it will lead to something else; or, you can do something for fundamental reasons, because you enjoy it or finding it fundamentally valuable. These folks usually make decisions that work better for them.

This naturally leads to lesson two:

2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.

Instead of trying to make yourself into something you’re not, make career choices that play to your strengths.

3. It’s not about you.

To be successful, you have to serve your client. Well. As an employee, your client is your boss. Make her (or him) look good. Help your teammates to succeed.

4. Persistence trumps talent.

(Boy, was I relieved when I read that one.) Or, as Woody Allen put it, “Eighty percent of success in life is just showing up.” (At least I understand that one: I’ve never understood “Hope is the thing with feathers” but I believe it’s true.)

5. Make excellent mistakes.

We all make mistakes. But some people are so afraid of making mistakes that they allow their fear and insecurity to prevent them from expressing themselves, using their creativity to solve problems, and, frankly, living.

Diana asks Johnny to look up his last name in the dictionary. Bunko is a verb and its definition is “make a mistake from which the benefits of what you’ve learned exceed the costs of the screw-up.”

6. Leave an imprint.

Diana again: “Truly successful people deploy them (the other career lessons) in the service of something larger than themselves.”