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

by Jeff Goins

There are three requirements for deliberate practice, according to Ericsson and his team of researchers. First, the practice requires a context: time and energy from the individual as well as trainers, ...

Add this to the slide deck. These three things.

Second, the activity must not be “inherently motivating.” It has to be something you wouldn...

Third, the activity cannot be done a very long time without leading to exhaustion.

I don’t know where this idea that your calling is supposed to be easy comes from.

If you can love what you do, even when it hurts, then you may have more than a hobby.

What a Prodigy Doesn’t Look Like

So how did a young man who dreamed of becoming an artist turn into a web developer?

And how did he learn all those skills so quickly?

The more complex answer, the honest one, is that before he knew what he was doing, Martyn was practicing.

Where should this go in my slide deck? Maybe were are not realizing our dreams but we are currently practicing them without knowing it. All the spokes suddenly come together to make a hub.

The lesson of the Accidental Apprenticeship is that long before a person is ready for his calling, life is preparing that person for the future through chance encounters and serendipitous experiences.

It Starts with a Spark

Aren’t we discrediting luck a little, though?

what we still don’t know—is what makes a person want to practice in the first place.

Where does motivation come from? “It starts with a spark,” Daniel Coyle told me in an interview. “You get a vision of your future self. You see someone you want to become. . . . It’s a very mysterious process.”

Bill Gates was

And Tiger Woods

So why did these men succeed in extraordinary ways when the same opportunities w...

“who recognize luck and seize it, leaders who grab luck events and make much more of them.”21

Good to great or Great By Choice could be reference books for the slide deck.

The question is what will you do when they arrive?

The ultimate goal of practice is to reach a state of what K. Anders Ericsson calls “eminent performance,” when a person goes “beyond the knowledge of their teachers to make a unique innovative contribution to their domain.”

Which should raise the question: Is it, perhaps, possible to succeed at the wrong thing? It is, indeed.

The Curious Case of William Hung

In 2011, though, that dream died when William ended his music career by accepting a job as a technical crime analyst.24

Was he giving up on his dream?

“I may disappoint you with saying this, but I’m actually hoping to become a math teacher someday.”

“takes even greater dedication” than music.

FOUR Building Bridges The Leap That Wasn’t a Leap

But most people, the normal people you and I encounter on a daily basis, seem to have no clue. And telling these folks “you just know” when most of us clearly do not seems cruel.

The myth goes like this: Your calling, if it comes at all, is something that arrives one day on your doorstep in a neatly wrapped package. You don’t have to worry about exerting any effort or anything; it will just work out.

At least you can live vicariously through those fortunate few who do get to find their callings.

So why does such a life seem so evasive, and why is it so rare? Because we’ve believed in this myth that we will just know when it’s time to commit.

We believe in the myth I know this how? ON the work force investment board One of the professors displayed a chart that showed a progression from grade school to highschool to college of a proper Hy planned career that started out as a boy Making a decision @ age 7 on what he would be doing until he retired. I Was not Capable of sUch preceient Cognition David Foster Walles said in his famous commencement speech about the fish in water. What is water.

The

When he heard the call a final time, he responded: “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

In the midst of your apprenticeship, perhaps while serving someone else’s dream, you will make a discovery of your own.

It would be easy to hear this story and make the mistake of thinking calling starts with an epiphany. It doesn’t. In fact, clarity of calling comes more through a series of deliberate decisions than it does through any sudden revelation.

“Jeff,” he said, looking me in the eyes, “you don’t have to want to be a writer. You are a writer. You just need to write.”

The Stages of Discovery

First, you hear the call. It may sound different to each person, but it comes to us all. How we hear and respond to it is what matters.

Only after you’ve put yourself in the shop of a master craftsman can you understand what your craft requires.

Humility is a prerequisite for epiphany. Without it, your dream will be short-lived and self-centered.

Second, you respond. Mere words will not suffice—you must act.

The five second rule

Third, you begin to believe. This is the paradox of vocation.

“The gifts do not precede the call,”

The Truth About the Leap

If you’re not feeling a little insecure about taking such a leap, then you probably haven’t considered the cost.

It’s six simple words: “I don’t know what to do.”

The path to your dream is more about following a direction than arriving at a destination.

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.

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.

So 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.