Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness--and a New Freedom--at Work

by Bill Burnett

Once we accept the problem, we are free to ask John what he really wants, and it’s obvious—to write poetry. That, in turn, can be reframed as having the opportunity to write poetry and perform poetry and to do as much as he can with poetry, thereby maximizing his expression, without worrying about how poetry is going to make money. So a good reframe for John might be: “I’m curious, how might I discover how poets enjoy and sustain their art while making a living doing other things?” That opens up a lot of prototyping potential. John could check out poetry slams; he could join a poetry circle (he didn’t even know that was a thing until he got curious and talked to people). John could write a poetry blog and start submitting his poems to poetry journals or, better yet, start his own poetry journal. John could practice some radical collaboration and start talking to literary agents who represent poets and authors. They could introduce John to professionally failed poets who found their way to a happy life as amateur poets. John could also reframe this poetry/money problem another way by saying, “How can I learn to live on what I’d make working only ten hours a week so I can be an almost-full-time poet?”