In the introduction, authors Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith tell us the book actually started out as three different books: one on selling, one on career/life advice for new graduates, and one on manners. While it may seem strange to combine these three things — when you consider they all are essentially ways of selling ourselves — it makes sense. Despite a few clunkers here and there, You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself, does a fairly good job of making it all work.

The book is written in bite-sized chunks, fitting 160+ lessons on everything from personal development to too much PowerPoint in roughly 300 pages. It makes for a quick read. How much you take away from it depends on where you started out. At times the lessons are profound and at other times clichéd. Thinking of the book as something for new graduates makes it easier to forgive the clichés, but be prepared: there's plenty here of which a professional person will already be aware.

A few examples will illustrate what you can expect from You, Inc. and why I felt alternately enlightened and annoyed by it.

A great message comes in a series of lessons about positioning yourself, whether that means selling your company to customers or selling your worth within an organization. “What Difference Do You Make?” asks one lesson, and it's a fitting question. If you can't identify where you are better or where you contribute in a unique, skilled way, you're going to miss the sale or miss the promotion. This is a lesson that's easy to forget in the non-stop, no-time-to-talk world we are often faced with.

Under the title “How to Be Fascinating,” the book offers a lesson on listening by relating a story of a man who was deemed a great conversationalist by a woman who had talked to him for 50 minutes. He barely spoke, but listened attentively. I have read this lesson, told in basically the same way, in dozens of books on selling and self-improvement. We all know we should be better listeners. It's time for the writers to come up with some new anecdotes on how to do so.