Here we are not dealing with the retired ex-manager in the mood to give unsolicited advice to young people from his comfortable armchair, nor with the young social science graduate who has learned from books to divide people and situations into categories. Every word of this well-structured handbook is not written with ink, but with tears, sweat and blood.

The author does not limit himself to pointing out the direction to the reader but, starting from his own experience, rich in failures and successes, he proposes to accompany him, to share with him the doubts, the hopes, the discernment, the search, the waiting, the trepidation, the preparatory work. He becomes a companion along the way, not a teacher of abstract and stale precepts.

Each page of this handbook therefore requires a work from the reader, a commitment of one's own freedom and responsibility, because nothing is taken for granted and nothing is due in today's competitive and globalized world. But this work is not loaded on the reader's shoulders like a heavy burden to be carried alone: like an apprentice in the workshop of a medieval craftsman, the reader will always find someone at his side or behind him ready to correct, to direct, to spur him on.

After all, this is how we learn and grow: by following someone who has already walked the path we want to walk, and who is ready to do it again with us for the passion of the human being. This manual does not guarantee anyone professional success.

Anyone who does would be a braggart and a charlatan, like the swindlers who sold the Elixir of Long Life in the West. But it does guarantee something more important: an experience of self-knowledge and of the "real" job market that will be useful, if not decisive, in every phase of the journey of discovery and conquest the job of our dreams.

. .