There are a great many (and many great) literary books about work. There are those that search for the deeper meaning of work by interviewing others about the work they do, such as Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life?, Studs Terkel's Working, and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alex De Botton. There are wonderful business novels, from Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener to Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. There are humorous work memoirs such as Dan Kennedy's Rock On and Iain Levison's underappreciated A Working Stiff's Manifesto.There's even a great literary anthology about business in literature, called Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business, from Tolstoy to Now.

George Singleton, author of Why Dogs Chase Cars and Work Shirts for Madmen, begins his wonderfully written story entitled "Refuse" by stating:

I'm pretty sure that my blind headfirst leap into writing fiction occurred for the same reasons it occurred with my brethren: I had discovered some new types of music, I'd been scorned one too many times by a woman, and my summer job involved driving a garbage truck.

In "Tote Monkey," Josilyn Jackson writes:

I said, "Sure. I will be an office assistant. Why not?"

I know the answer to that now. The job should have been called Paper Tote Monkey. Because that's what I did. I toted paper. [...]

I learned quickly that since I had flunked out of school, gotten in a fight with God, moved away from all my friends, and was so ashamed that I was desperate to avoid my family, boredom was the worst thing for me. Being a Tote Monkey gave me way too much time to think, and I spent it dwelling on all the ways I'd failed.

Don't worry... it's gotten much better for Ms. Jackson. She's now the New York Times bestselling author of gods in Alabama, Between, Georgia, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming and Backseat Saints.

Some people work to satisfy their creative urges outside of their day job; Their are poets in our factories, painters in our corn fields and short story writers in our used-car lots. Being a garbage man or an office assistant is honorable, and is fulfilling work if approached right. But Don't Quit Your Day Job reinforces that sometimes you have to (quit your day job), that there's also honor in pursuing your passion as your career. And, hey, sometimes it even works out.

Every month, Penguin/Portfolio posts a new free podcast that you can download from iTunes or listen to on their site called The Business Beat. It was exciting news to hear that The Business Beat was featured in USA TODAY’s “Watch, Listen and Read” column today--it’s on 6B of the Money section, if you have a paper copy on hand--, not only because we love the work that Portfolio does with its business books, but because at the end of every program, Jack reviews a classic business book in his Just Jack! section.

The past month's episode...

answers the questions that many new business school graduates are asking themselves: How can we maintain our ethical standards while succeeded in our careers? How do we continue our business education after graduation? What do we do with the rest of our lives? And does an MBA even matter these days? To answer these questions, co-hosts Courtney Young and Laura Clark brought in a panel of experts. Portfolio president and publisher Adrian Zackheim talks about the significance of an MBA in today's business climate. Peter Escher, co-author of The MBA Oath, discusses the efforts of a group of Harvard Business School graduates to bring ethics back to business. 800-CEO-READ's Jack Covert, author of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, explains why everyone needs to read Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life. And Michael O'Malley, author of The Wisdom of Bees, shares some business lessons from an unexpected source.

The next edition, available May 18th, will find Jack reviewing Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start.

USA Today writer, Michele Archer, describes The Business Beat as such: "Clocking in at about 25 minutes, The Business Beat makes a fine commute accompaniment." And we agree wholeheartedly.

I've been thinking a lot today about "day jobs" and what that concept means to people. For some, it's what they do, it's what they're good at, and for lack of a better term, it's their lives. For others, it's something they use, to pay the bills while they wait for something better to come along, or to fund projects they're working on outside of work, that don't make enough money to survive on.

Actor/director Crispin Glover is in Milwaukee today, and is an interesting case study for the 'day job' concept. Most people recognize Glover from his quirky roles in big Hollywood films, but less are aware of what he does off camera. As a director, Glover's films will never get Hollywood support and distribution because of their subject matter, but that's ok with him. In fact, he has very specific criteria for how his films are presented: For one, he must be present any time one of his films are shown. At these events, Glover does a brief slideshow, screens his current film, holds a lengthy Q&A about the film, and then stands in the lobby and personally greets every attendee.

It doesn't take a ton of knowledge about the cost of film production to understand that this is a very expensive effort. For Glover, it's ok, because that's what he uses his day job for - to fund the production and screening of his own films, exactly the way he wants to.

While all of us don't have million dollar day jobs to fund our personal interests, it's perhaps more interesting to make note of those that accomplish great things on much smaller budgets. Here at 800-CEO-READ, there's a good amount of entrepreneurial spirit in the house, and whether we or our families or friends are using monetary resources to pay for projects, the important thing is to acknowledge the drive to produce those projects.

In ending, I feel it's appropriate to point out Jack Covert's recent recap of Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life? for Penguin's Business Beat. How we answer that question can give us a great deal of insight into what we do, and why we do it. It's OK to have a day job. It's OK to not do your "passion" full-time. If you think creatively, and plan accordingly, you can find all sorts of enjoyment, resources, and opportunities that lie within any number of things done during the day, or after business hours. The important thing is to not waste time, but take every chance you can to find something fulfilling within everything you do.

➻ Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market, pondered Improving the Let's-Persuade-Business-to-Improve Movement in a recent Harvard Business Review post. There's a lot of folks out there writing about we can persuade business and those in it to behave more ethically, but Fox thinks its still a hard sell:

I don't think anyone has come up with an argument for or description of better business behavior that has anything like the elegance and power of the economists' "incentives matter."

He ends, understandably, on a slightly defeated note, writing: "Clearly, I'm stuck here. Can somebody help me out?" Umair Haque, his colleague at HBR tried to answer his call for help, making The Case for Being Disruptively Good, arguing for the forces of information, discipline, competition, disruption and rule-making. He writes:

So why don't more businesses see these forces? It's the wrong question. The right one is: because there will be some organizations that are quicker to get it than others, what do the forces above mean for the economy? Well, they suggest that businesses who can do more good will survive, thrive, and prosper — and those who do more bad will stumble, falter, and fall.

I think he's definitety right, but he is taking a pretty long view of history when he writes: "Yesterday, the global economy was built on debtors' prisons, usury, expropriation, colonialism, and slavery. Today, it isn't." and "Yet even two hundred years from now, I'm sure incumbents will ask—what, you want us to do more good? And then, as ever, from under their patrician noses, revolutionaries who can do better will disrupt them." And while Umair's language speaks to me, I don't know if it is as catchy as "incentives matter" to those marching off to Wall Street. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

➻ Richard Florida also takes a longer view in his works about the creative class—such as The Rise of the Creative Class—and he has a great new book coming out in May called The Great Reset. You can get a taste of the book in his March article in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America, or by reading his recent interview with Conor Clarke for the same magazine.

➻ Portfolio has posted a new issue of The Business Beat. Featured this month are Peter Escher, author of The MBA Oath, Michael O'Malley, author of The Wisdom of Bees, and, as always, our own peerless leader Jack Covert in his Just Jack corner. Jack discusses Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life, one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and a close second (in my mind) to Studs Terkel's Working as the best book of interviews ever created about work.

➻ Speaking of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, you can now read it in Indonesian.* Muhammad Mishbah penned a review for Seputar Indonesia Daily writing:

Books 100 Best Business Books of All Time provides 100 units with a discussion of book selection of different problems. This book is like a "dictionary" of business books that point us in order to save time, money and energy before seeking appropriate books.

(Shakes fist at Google Translate.)

*This applies only to those of you that can actually read Indonesian.

➻ Peter Elkind's new book, Rough Justice: The Rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer, is embargoed until next Tuesday, but you can get a preview at Fortune, blessed as they were with an an exclusive excerpt. "'Is there a way to wire money where it's not evident that it's coming from me?' the governor asked."

➻ The Web Designer Depot posted a great overview of Scott Belsky's Making Ideas Happen by Cameron Chapman. He writes "Making Ideas Happen is an excellent resource for those of us who have no shortage of ideas but often have a hard time seeing those ideas through to completion." That is everyone I know, including me and probably you.

➻ Roger C. Parker has a novel idea: Learn to write a business book by studying 800-CEO-READ’s Top 25 Business Books.

➻ "Some people seem to think life is all about the I, and the Me, Me, Me." The WePad begs to differ. (HT to Siobhan O’Leary at Publishing Perspectives.)

➻ Following the Freakonomics trend, America's finest news source, The Onion, reported recently that "last month's quarter-inch drop in height among Mexican dead-lift competitors in the middle-heavyweight division could spell disaster for GE's aviation and software subsidiaries." "But, like anything else, a shrewd investor must always ask himself one thing: How many hot dogs did I eat last year?"

➻ I'll ask her someday.