In this volume I discuss the four biggest unpleasant surprises that recent graduates and newly employed social workers are confronted with in their career. These four surprises are also the biggest causes of burnout, bitterness, and early retirement (including getting fired and changing careers). However, this can be avoided. Most postgraduate college courses for this profession will not teach you these lessons; why, I don't know. But you will learn what many social workers, and causalities of the field, had wished someone taught them before they were blindsided and left for dead—numb and useless to help anyone—including their self. The lessons I teach in this volume are based on the knowledge I attained from the Life of Hard-Knocks University; they also come from over 20 years of experience in the counseling field—in several settings; from working with over one hundred counselors or social workers; from supervising close to fifty counselors; from teaching college courses to hundreds of psychology students who desire to be social workers; and from watching countless counseling comrades fall and not get up.