The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do

by Jeff Goins

there’s room to get your calling wrong.

A pivot is powerful because it takes away all of your excuses. It puts you back in control of the game you’re playing. Pivoting isn’t plan B; it’s part of the process.

Successful people and organizations don’t succeed in spite of failure; they succeed because of it.

The world can be cruel. It’s nobody’s responsibility to make your dream come true. Tough times will come, and what determines a person’s success during such trying times is the ability to pivot.

In any pursuit, the temptation is to go it alone—to subscribe to a few blogs, read a business book, and start acting like an expert. We praise such entrepreneurial initiative, thinking it’s what drives modern innovation, but we couldn’t be more wrong. Every great endeavor begins with a smaller, less significant one.

But pain is the great teacher and failure a faithful mentor.

As Robert Greene wrote in his book Mastery, “Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.”

Every calling is marked by a season of insignificance, a period when nothing seems to make sense. This is a time of wandering in the wilderness, when you feel alone and misunderstood. To the outsider, such a time looks like failure, as if you are grasping at air or simply wasting time. But the reality is this is the most important experience a person can have if they make the most of it.

what separates a season of failure from a lifetime of failure? First you must be willing to recognize hardship as an opportunity to learn, willing yourself to push through failure. Second, you must be careful to not succeed at the wrong things. You have to pay attention to passion and beware of the temptation of success. It’s not enough to be good at something; you must focus on what you are meant to do.

A calling is not merely a moment; it’s a lifestyle, a constant progression of submitting to a larger purpose. When you are first called, whether it comes as a whisper or a roar, what you hear is only part of the big picture, a shadow of something bigger. And as you move toward your life’s work, you must deepen that awareness, looking for signs to hone your understanding and for opportunities to change direction along the way.

This is good news, because it means we can fail; we can miss the mark without veering completely off course. We can change directions and try new things, learning as we go. Your life’s work is not a single event, but a process you are constantly perfecting, finding new ways to put your passion to work. And you do that one pivot at a time.

We can spend our days dreaming of a better life or do the messy work of getting started today. You are not just waiting on your calling; your calling is waiting on you. And you can sit around, playing the what-if game until you’re exhausted, or you can begin by saying that one little word that changes everything: let’s.

On our deathbeds, we will see things with the most clarity we have ever had. Each of us will have to face the facts of how we spent our lives, especially when we had the opportunity to act and didn’t. What I fear more than anything about that day is how I will have to answer for all the times I didn’t live up to my potential, why I didn’t embrace my calling more fully.

Fear. We all feel it. It’s a force that afflicts even the most courageous. So what do we do about it? We lean in, realizing that failure is inevitable, but it’s also not a legitimate obstacle.

But here’s the catch: a calling will always lead you to a life that matters, one you can be proud of. The way that we get there, though, isn’t always up to us. Sometimes the path can be costly, even deadly. But what lies at the end of the road is a prize that money can’t buy and a legacy the world won’t forget.

Most authors I know live portfolio lives. So do graphic designers and construction workers and self-employed people.

They didn’t do just one thing but instead embraced a diverse set of activities that formed a complete identity. This is the way the world works now—and maybe the way it’s supposed to work.

People are not robots, programmed to do one thing. We are multifaceted creatures with many varied interests. And though we may like to believe we were born to do just one thing, or perhaps we’re comfortable with only having one career, the reality is most of us are hardwired for a handful of activities that when combined lead to our greatest satisfaction and best work.

We are complicated creatures, full of many interests and assorted passions. What do we do with all of them? We are not what we do for a living, but our life is made up of what we do. So how do we take this complexity into account? And what if our calling will never pay the bills? Do we give up the pursuit? Take a vow of poverty?

The basic idea of a portfolio life is that instead of thinking of your work as a monolithic activity, what if you chose to see it as the complex group of interests, passions, and activities it is? And what if instead of identifying with a job description, you began to see the whole mass of things you do as one portfolio of activity?

Charles Handy in his book The Age of Unreason. In the book, Handy lays out five different types of work that make up your portfolio. They are: fee work, salar...

a calling is more than a career; it’s the purpose and direction of your life. Which means that it doesn’t just apply to what you do; it’s who you are.

I don’t like the word hobbies. To me, those are things you never intend to take seriously. But we all have things we do for the pure love of the activity, regardless of whether they ever provide an income. Psychologists call this activity “play.”

Here’s how Hara Marano, editor at large for Psychology Today, puts it: “We would all agree that play lifts stress from us. It refreshes us and recharges us. It restores our optimism. It changes our perspective, stimulating creativity … But there is also evidence that play does much more. It may in fact be the highest expression of our humanity.”5 Whatever you do to recharge at the end of the day isn’t a diversion. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be. It can be the very thing that keeps you healthy and sane. It can even serve to strengthen you as well as rest does. Your taste in music, the kinds of books you enjoy, even your favorite foods all contribute to the person you are and the portfolio you’re creating—and therefore, make up your calling.

without a why behind the what that you do, your career becomes meaningless and ultimately useless.

When the world seems to conspire against you and when everyone around calls you a failure, true masters keep going. Even when others don’t understand, masters recognize their allegiance is to a higher calling than pleasing the masses. Joyce was trying to do something the world had never seen. He was chasing a passion, and what we learn from such dedication is that what looks like irrelevance now can lead to legacy later. But passion alone is not enough to sustain the work. True mastery is about greatness, about doing something that pushes the limitations of what others think is possible or even sensible. Peter Senge, a professor at MIT, describes mastery as something that “goes beyond competence and skills … It means approaching one’s life as a creative work.”

It’s about understanding your potential and then dedicating your life to pursuing that ideal. It means doing your absolute best.

this is the role of work in our lives—not only as a means to make a living, but as a tool to make us into who we were born to be.

We don’t often think about how what we do affects who we are. Because a job is often just a job, it’s easy to believe our activity doesn’t affect our identity. It’s true that you are not what you do, but you can become what you practice.

Every worker has a moral responsibility to ask deeper questions of the work. She wrote, “We should ask of an enterprise, not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’ ”9 When you do what Sayers calls serving the work, you do what you were meant to do and you do it well. The rest is not up to you. Wealth may come. Fame too. But those are not the goal. Our job is to see work as a means of making us better, not just richer, people.

Csikszentmihalyi described that feeling you get when you are in a state of flow: “You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears. You forget yourself. You feel part of something larger.”

“Don’t search for your calling,” he said. “Explore, try new things, keep your feet moving. Something will grab you. It will call to you.

You have to have a goal, to know where you’re going, in order to get there. It seems obvious, but so many people chase after a dream without any idea of what they’re really trying to achieve.

Poverty and wealth are concepts that cannot be defined merely by what you have or make.

This me-first way of looking at vocation doesn’t work. When you look around at the world, you see a curious trend in the lives of some billionaires and movie stars. They aren’t content to simply savor the fruit of their labor, but neither do they let their largesse lead to unproductive guilt. They understand that feeling guilty, in and of itself, doesn’t accomplish anything. Instead, they’re using their resources and influence to improve other people’s lives. Leveraging their connections and celebrity, understanding that people will listen to them, they’re trying to do something good.

Share success with others

the question of legacy isn’t a matter of if you live long enough or when you retire; it’s a matter of what you will do with what you have right now. You don’t have to earn a living for thirty years to turn around and spend the next thirty giving it away. If significance is what matters to you, you can structure your life and work in a way that allows you to live your legacy now. In fact, your giving doesn’t have to be a by-product of your success; it can be the very thing that drives it in the first place.

Legacy significance

Sometimes all the little things in life aren’t interruptions to our calling. They are the most important part. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon wrote in a song to his son, Sean.

Life has a funny way of teaching us that sometimes the most important stuff is the ordinary stuff. The smallest moments, the ones we think are insignificant, are the ones we will cherish the most. As you endeavor to do something amazing with your life, don’t forget that without people to support your dream, your work will always be incomplete. A life filled with achievements and accolades but lacking those people necessary to celebrate those moments is not much of a life at all.

a calling is more than a career; it is a life lived well. And the very things you try to avoid are what you need the most to make this story matter.

your calling was about doing something good in this world. Now I understand it’s about becoming someone good—and letting that goodness impact the world around you. Which means that you won’t fully appreciate the whole story you’re living until the end. But for now, if you are intentional and willing to appreciate the fact that you don’t see the whole narrative, you can enjoy more of the journey.

Freedom is a great thing, but freedom without restriction can be paralyzing. When it comes to vocation, we need some boundaries as well, parameters that allow us to focus. The good news is that the path to your life’s work is already laid out for you. It has been there since the beginning of your life, and it’s quite different from that of your friends or those famous people you admire.

this quest we’ve been talking about is not just a physical one; it’s a spiritual one. It is, in a way, a journey of becoming.

To be called is not enough. You must become your calling, a choice that happens only if you make it. Why do so few people do this? What’s really at stake here? As with any journey, there is risk and danger, the likelihood of failure. And most would rather play it safe than be rejected by their friends or fall on their faces for the world to see.

Every day you and I face a choice: to either pursue our authentic selves or a shadow of the real thing. We either do what is expected of us, or we listen to that voice of intuition deep inside promising something more significant.

Viktor Frankl wrote, looking for a reason to be happy. Fulfillment isn’t just for the elite few who find a purpose for life; it’s for everyone. And that potential exists in each and every one of us. You have everything you need to be your whole self; it’s already in you. Now you just have to become

A calling isn’t something new and shiny. Often it’s something old and predictable, a familiar face that’s easily taken for granted, an old habit or hobby that comes back into our lives. It’s our true self, shared with the world. But sometimes it takes a wake-up call for us to see that this work that we’re doing is more significant than we realize.

The easiest way to miss your calling is to ignore the call. Maybe it feels too risky, or maybe you feel too old and silly chasing a dream that now seems out of reach. We keep putting off starting for “someday,” which never comes.

Another way to miss your calling is to treat it as an event instead of a lifestyle. Remember: your vocation is more of a magnum opus than a single masterpiece. It’s an entire body of work, not a single piece. You will spend your life creating it, and if you stop too soon or don’t see your entire life as a means of accomplishing that task, you could miss it.

The same is true for us and the way we pursue our callings. Success isn’t the goal; legacy is. Ultimately, we are called to call others; we are given gifts to be given away. All that to say: when you find yourself at the pinnacle of personal greatness, you may just be getting started.

Life is not an inconvenience to the work we dream of; it’s the reason we do it in the first place. A calling does not compete with or even complement your life. Your life, when lived well, becomes your calling—your magnum opus.