More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Goins
Read between
June 27 - August 17, 2017
Hanging out in coffee shops and talking about one day being a writer or an activist or an entrepreneur is just about the worst thing you can do. It feels like work but is in fact destructive to the real work of realizing your dream.
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. —ROBERT GREENE
Your calling is not just one thing; it’s a few things. The trick is to not be a jack-of-all-trades but to become a master of some.
For a year, Jody worked in Spokane, driving home on the weekends to be with his wife.
What was Jody's wife's plans?
“It’s called a portfolio life,”
“A portfolio life. It means you aren’t just a writer or a husband or a dad. You are all those things, and you need to embrace them.”
They didn’t do just one thing but instead embraced a diverse set of activities that formed a complete identity.
This idea was first coined by 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, salary work, homework, study work, and gift work.
For example, if you need to make $50,000 per year and can figure out a way to make $250 a day, then you only need to work 200 days a year.
It’s the work behind the work, and although it may not take eight hours a day, without a why behind the what that you do, your career becomes meaningless and ultimately useless.
Sensible people reinvent themselves every ten years.”
But what if doing things quickly and easily wasn’t the point? What if our work was meant to not only serve the world but to make the worker better?
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.”
What Is Work For?
If the purpose of work is wealth and prosperity, what happens once you hit your goal of making enough money? Do you retire early? Some do. But even then, the goal seems small and somehow petty.
During World War II, British writer Dorothy Sayers wrote a compelling essay called “Why Work?” and in
“We should ask of an enterprise, not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’
Increases in income—once you’ve reached a certain threshold above the poverty line—do not make people happier.
This is the problem I see with franchise models like Pridestaff. You have to get people like me to buy them because they can afford them but the work of selling is not the fullfilling intelectual work they need at that point in their careers. Just sell more. Have more sales activities. Just make more calls. It ain't working for me.
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon
But there is often a purpose in these moments—to remind you that 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.
Sometimes, a calling is simply accepting your role in a story that is bigger than you.
Another way to miss your calling is to treat it as an event instead of a lifestyle.
There is a great temptation in the pursuit of meaningful work to lose yourself in the process. That’s what an addiction promises: total annihilation of self. You begin to no longer be able to dissociate
What good, then, is it to pursue a calling if the pursuit may destroy you? How do we balance this tension between the ceaseless call of work and life itself?
This reminds me of Bukowski's "Find what you love and let it kill you."
Many of us fear what Hemingway feared—that we will die with important work still left in us. “We all die unfinished symphonies,”
To paraphrase Leonardo da Vinci, we can never complete the task. We only abandon it.
The right choice isn’t to retire, to simply settle in and invite death. It’s to work hard and passionately, but acknowledge the limitations of what one life is capable of.
The Message of Your Deathbed
What we learn from Einstein and Hemingway is that a healthy fear of death drives a person to continue creating until the very end, but with that fear must come the acceptance that even your life’s work will, in some ways, remain unfinished. Why is this, and what do we do with such a humbling reality?
At that point, you can either abandon the work, giving up in despair, or find a way to pass it on. You can do this by building a team, as Ben and Kristy Carlson did, or creating an organization that multiplies your influence.
awareness, apprenticeship, practice, discovery, profession, mastery, and legacy—
The Seven Stages and Accompanying Lessons (Chapter Summary)
Awareness: Before you can tell your life what you want to do with it, you must listen to what it wants to do with you. 2. Apprenticeship: Every story of success is a story of community. Although mentors are hard to come by, accidental apprenticeships are everywhere. Your life is preparing you for what’s to come. 3. Practice: Real practice hurts. It takes not only time but intentional effort. But some things do come naturally. Be open to learning new skills, and watch for sparks of inspiration to guide you. 4. Discovery: Don’t take the leap; build a bridge. You never “just know” what you’re
...more
Seven Signs You’ve Found Y...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Exercise 1: Create a “listen to your life” timeline. Draw a horizontal line on a piece of paper and use it to plot out the significant events in your life.
At the same time, reach out to a handful of friends or family members and ask them to describe something that you do better than anyone they know.
Exercise 2: Design your own apprenticeship. Don’t go in search of a mentor; instead, identify the mentors that are already around you.
Exercise 3: Practice in the margins. Instead of preparing to take some giant leap, start working on your calling today. Don’t overcommit.
Make a list of activities you can do to the point of exhaustion and start pushing yourself in them,
Exercise 4: Look for pivot points. Go back to the line you drew in Exercise 1 and mark your greatest moments of failure. When did you try something and it didn’t work?
Exercise 5: Identify discovery moments. Was there a time when something was unclear to you but obvious to someone else?
try e-mailing five people who know you well and ask them to describe you. You might be surprised to see what you learn about yourself.
Exercise 6: Plan your portfolio. Instead of planning out your ideal week, focus instead on the next year.
Exercise 7: Share the work. In chapter 7, we saw how a calling is not just about you.
Also, identify as many as three people you want to personally invest in. Don’t think of this as a formal mentorship; just start showing up in a few people’s lives in hopes of helping them grow.
