Always Eat Left Handed

“Start smoking? Be a cross-dresser? Procrastinate more? Make people cry? Learn to yodel?”

This entertainingly irreverent book from Wall Street Journal bestselling author and occasional Georgetown University professor Rohit Bhargava is filled with brutally honest secrets of success no one has ever dared to tell you.

Reading just a few of these "secrets," you might wonder if this book is serious. Indeed, it is.

For anyone sick of hearing you should do what you love, take more risks and make mistakes, this empowering book is like a desperately needed pair of noise-canceling headphones for uselessly obvious advice. Instead, Always Eat Left Handed offers a real world, no-nonsense playbook for getting ahead in school, work and life by doing exactly the opposite of what most people tell you. Starting, of course, with eating left handed.

Always Eat Left Handed was built for exactly the kind of shared reading experience a First Year Experience program needs: it is short, funny, and immediately relatable, so students who have never picked up a business or self-help book actually finish it. Each of the 15 chapters stands on its own, which makes the book easy to break into discussion sections, workshops, or a single all-campus read without asking incoming students to commit to something long or academic.

The advice itself is intentionally counterintuitive; every "secret" pushes back on the obvious advice students have heard their whole lives, which makes for lively, sometimes contentious discussion rather than a lecture. That format travels well beyond the classroom into orientation weeks, peer mentor programs, and student life programming.

For programs evaluating their next common read, we have also put together a checklist for what makes a great FYE read.