The Art of Work

A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do
by Jeff Goins | Thomas Nelson © 2015 · 240 pages

As the sub-title suggests, this book is all about “A proven path to discovering what you were meant to do.” If you’re looking for an inspiring introduction to clarifying and living your purpose, I think you’ll enjoy this book. Big Ideas we explore include a quick peek at the 7 characteristics of a Calling, why Awareness is so important, why Painful Practice is also super important, why we should be thinking “bridges” not “leaps” as we pursue our calling ad other goodness.

This is not a book about miracles. It is a book about finding your calling, about how you discover what you were born to do. A calling is that thing that you can’t *not* do, an answer to the age-old question, ‘What should I do with my life?’
Jeff Goins

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Big Ideas

“When asked how I got to this point, I struggle to give an intelligent answer. The experience of finding your calling can be both mysterious and practical. It takes effort but also seems to happen to you at times. What I’ve come to understand is that finding your purpose is more of a path than a plan: it involves twists and turns that you never expected. Ultimately these surprises lead you to your destiny. And once you arrive at what you thought was the destination, you realize it’s only another leg in the journey.

This book is a description of that path, as well as the steps it takes to navigate it.

Everyone, it seems, is searching for a purpose, for something to satisfy their deepest desires. I believe that ‘something’ is a calling. What is a calling? You will hear me use the word interchangeably with the terms vocation and life’s work, but quite simply, it is the reason you were born.”

~ Jeff Goins from The Art of Work

As the sub-title suggests, this book is all about “A proven path to discovering what you were meant to do.”

If you’re looking for an inspiring introduction to clarifying and living your purpose, I think you’ll enjoy this book. (Get a copy here.)

Jeff Goins shares inspiring stories of ordinary people who have discovered and are living their calling. The book is structured in three parts: I. Preparation + II. Action + III. Completion in which Goins features the seven characteristics of living our calling (see first Big Idea).

It’s packed with Big Ideas and I’m excited to share some of my favorites. Let’s jump straight in.

The 7 Characteristics of a calling

“After encountering hundreds of stories from people who found their calling, I’ve identified seven common characteristics, each illustrated in the subsequent chapter. Each chapter, which tells at least one person’s story, is based on a theme:

  1. Awareness
  2. Apprenticeship
  3. Practice
  4. Discovery
  5. Profession
  6. Mastery
  7. Legacy

You might want to think of these as steps, but they are more like overlapping stages that, once begun, continue for the rest of your life.”

The 7 characteristics of a calling. Each gets its own chapter.

Let’s take a super quick look:

1. Awareness. The essence of this idea is the fact that we need to be aware that *something* is missing in our lives—that we’re capable of more than we’re currently being. Without that awareness, we’ll miss the opportunities that present themselves.

2. Apprenticeship. In the good ol’ days, one mastered a craft via an extended apprenticeship phase in which the young student apprenticed with the Master (usually for around 7 years) before heading out as a “Journeyman” honing the craft before submitting a Masterpiece to the guild for acceptance as a Master. These days a 3 month internship (!) is often the depth of an apprenticeship. We need to lean in just a tad more.

3. Practice. Jeff references the usual suspects (Dan Coyle, Geoff Colvin, Carol Dweck) to describe the importance of practice. 10 years (like the Apprentice)/10,000 hours of what is often described as “deliberate practice” or “deep practice.” Jeff calls it “painful practice” as it forces you to stretch outside of your comfort zone and if you’re not feeling at least a little pain you’re doing it wrong. :)

4. Discovery. Jeff makes the important distinction between “making a leap” and “building a bridge.” We want to let go of the naïve idea that we suddenly discover our purpose and, rather, get to work on incrementally revealing it a little more. Think shovel rather than map. Build the bridge one insight/learning opportunity at a time kinda thing.

5. Profession. Now it’s time to embrace failure. There’s no such thing as a straight line to greatness. Plan B isn’t a detour. It IS the path. We need to get good at pivoting and gracefully learn from mistakes and failures as we get deeper clarity and power.

6. Mastery. Jeff makes the case that mastery isn’t just about one thing and describes a “portfolio” approach in which we embrace multiple facets of our lives and optimize each.

7. Legacy. Ultimately, our calling isn’t just about what we do but who we ARE and how we give our greatest gifts in greatest service to the world.

With that, let’s dive in to a few of my favorite Big Ideas on how to bring that wisdom to life!

The seven characteristics of a calling—awareness, apprenticeship, practice, discovery, profession, mastery, and legacy—are not a formula. They are a description of the path you are already on.
Jeff Goins

Awareness: Preparation for the call

“In any great narrative, there is a moment when a character must decide to become more than a bystander. It’s an important moment that always seems to happen in the mind before it unfolds in real life. This choice, though, is always preceded by something deeper, a nagging feeling that there must be more.

This is why when people are called to some great task, they know it. Immediately they recognize the prompting to step up and do something significant, because they have been waiting for it. Before the call comes, we must possess some sense that awakens us to our purpose.

Awareness, then, is what prepares us for the call.

Before you know what your calling is, you must believe that you are called to something. It doesn’t mater if you know what. In order to cultivate awareness, you must be willing to act, to step out and see what happens. And once you are convinced that purpose will not find you, that you will have to go in search of it, you are ready. Until you make this choice, though, you will feel frustrated, seeing people succeed and chalking it up to luck or some unfair advantage. And in doing this, you will deceive yourself.”

Awareness. It’s Step 1.

If you already know your calling, awesome. (Seriously. Incredibly awesome.)

If not, let’s focus on the most essential aspect of this first quality of a calling: Do you believe that you are called to SOMETHING?

It doesn’t matter whether or not you know the details right now. It DOES matter whether or not you believe in the idea that you are called to do something meaningful with your life.

That sense of “Really? There has to be more to my life than this!” is a GOOD thing.

As Goins advises, “That’s what awareness is: a sense that something more is possible.”

That sense of possibility is a prerequisite to being open to discovery. Without it, we remain stuck in mediocrity and mired in victim-thinking—attributing other people’s success to sheer luck, etc.

Let’s remember Maslow’s admonition that what one *can* be, one must be. You have potential waiting to be expressed. Let’s shine a bright light of Awareness on that as we take the next steps in discovering what we are meant to do.

Your life, though a mystery, is trying to tell you something. Are you listening?
Jeff Goins

Painful practice

“In an era of human history in which we prize comfort above nearly every other virtue, we have overlooked an important truth: comfort never leads to excellence. What it takes to become great at your craft is practice, but not just any kind of practice—the kind that hurts, that stretches and grows you. This kind of practice, which Ericsson called ‘deliberate’ and we might consider more appropriately as ‘painful,’ is extremely difficult. It takes place over the course of about ten years, or ten thousand hours—incidentally the average length of an apprenticeship. But this is not where the practice ends; it’s just where it begins. In other words, you don’t clock in ten thousand hours and instantly become an expert. You have to do the right kind of practice.”

Two things I’d like to cover here.

First, that’s from the chapter called “Painful Practice.” K. Anders Ericsson, the Swedish psychologist whose research revealed the root of elite performance had less to do with inborn talent than hard work, calls it “deliberate practice.” Dan Coyle calls it “deep practice.” Matthew Syed calls it “purposeful practice.” Goins calls it “painful practice.”

The point? You need to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone if you want to truly master yourself and your craft.

I love the practical way Dan Coyle frames it in The Little Book of Talent (see Notes) to help us find what he calls “the sweet spot.” He tells us: “There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the sweet spot. Here’s how to find it.

Comfort Zone
Sensations: Ease, effortlessness. You’re working, but not reaching or struggling.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 80 percent and above

Sweet Spot
Sensations: Frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You’re fully engaged in an intense struggle—as if you’re stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it with your fingertips, then reaching again.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 50-80 percent.

Survival Zone
Sensations: Confusion, desperation. You’re overmatched: scrambling, thrashing, and guessing. You guess right sometimes, but it’s mostly luck.
Percentage of Successful Attempts: Below 50 percent.”

That’s part 1 of this Idea. We need to stretch ourselves out of our comfort zone but not so far that we snap. We want to find the sweet spot. Thank you, Dan.

The second part is about the fact that our training doesn’t stop once we hit the 10 year/10,000/whatever mark. For the best, it’s just the beginning.

I can’t think of anyone who captures this idea better than Itzhak Perlman. He practices 9 hours a day. EVERY DAY. Unless he’s performing. Then it’s 4.5 hours of practice + the performance.

Here’s how Matthew Kelly captures his commitment in The Rhythm of Life (see Notes): “Itzhak Perlman is one of the finest violinists alive today. Several years ago, Perlman agreed to attend a charity reception after one of his concerts in Vienna. Tickets for the champagne reception were sold for the equivalent of five hundred American dollars per guest.

At the reception, while the guests mingled, Itzhak Perlman stood in a roped-off area flanked by security guards. One by one the guests were led into the roped-off area and introduced to Perlman. As one man entered the roped-off area, he stretched out his hand, shook hands with the violinist, and said, ‘Mr. Perlman, you were phenomenal tonight. Absolutely amazing.’ Perlman smiled and thanked the man graciously for the compliment. The man continued, ‘All my life I have had a great love of the violin, and I have heard every great living violinist, but I have never heard anyone play the violin as brilliantly as you did tonight.’ Perlman smiled again but said nothing, and the man continued, ‘You know, Mr. Perlman, I would give my whole life to be able to play the violin like you did tonight.’

Perlman smiled once more and said, ‘I have.’”

The fruits of that lifetime of commitment? Watch this.

So, back to you: What is it you aspire to master? Most importantly: How’s your practice?

We all want to do something that we are good at, that the world in some way recognizes, but the point of practice is never just about skill acquisition. It’s about making a contribution to the world.
Jeff Goins

Leaps vs. Bridges

“Any great discovery, especially that of your life’s work, is never a single moment. In fact, epiphany is an evolutionary process; it happens in stages. …

A calling, though mysterious at times, requires a practical response. The way we make our way from dream to reality is through small incremental steps. Decisions reveal opportunity.”

That’s from a great chapter called “Building Bridges.” The primary theme there is the fact that we don’t need to “make leaps” as much as we need to “build bridges.”

Again, many of us get stymied when we think we should a) already know our purpose with absolute clarity or b) receive that clarity in a lightning bolt of inspiration delivered via a choir of angels hovering over a burning bush.

We want a clear map that spells it all out. But Goins tells us what we *really* need is a shovel. And a willingness to dig. To make decisions, to take action, to test different ideas. To embrace mistakes and failures and wrong turns as we gain a little more clarity with each step/misstep.

We build bridges from our dream to our reality with each one of those steps—rather than try to cross some huge chasm in a giant leap.

Peter Sims describes all the “Little Bets” (see Notes) great people make in the discovery and expression of their callings. He says we “do things to discover what to do.”

Gregg Krech describes it as incrementalism or gradualism and likens it to the millions-year-long process of evolution in The Art of Taking Action (see Notes).

Here’s to using that shovel (+ other necessary tools) to build our bridges one tiny piece at a time!

Rarely do easy and greatness go together. The art of doing hard things requires an uncommon level of dedication.
Jeff Goins

Pivot lately?

“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 a part of the process. Unexpected things will happen; setbacks do occur. Whether or not you’re prepared to pivot will affect how well you weather those storms and find a way to survive.

We often look at successful people, hearing their stories of failure, and think that they succeeded despite the fact that they failed. But that’s not true. 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. Every calling encounters setbacks, and sometimes people don’t want what you have to offer, or maybe they just don’t understand it. Other times, life throws you a curveball or the passion you once had wanes. At times like these, we are inclined to give up, but these are the moments that require our most intentional action.”

Pivots. Every great hero’s journey/project/etc. features at least one. :)

You pour your heart and soul into a project—so confident that you’ve got it figured out. And… then… it doesn’t quite work the way you planned.

D’oh. Oops. Eek. Gah!

I’ve had a significant, painful pivot in each of the three businesses I’ve helped create. The first, eteamz, was originally designed to serve sports leagues (think Little League Baseball, AYSO soccer, etc.). But it was almost impossible to sell the vision to leagues. So, we scrapped that plan and focused on teams. Might not sound big but (laughing) it was. Now eteamz serves 3m teams.

Then, in my second biz, we spent 18 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars building a web platform for small entrepreneurs. Tons of momentum but the product never really came together. We threw away all that work and code in what I imagined was one big ball of tinfoily ick and started from scratch—not knowing what was next. I can still remember my dear friend’s face when we had a board meeting to discuss. He had invested everything he had and simultaneously wanted to remain super supportive while doing the math in his head on how much he just lost. (I can laugh as I type that now but OMG that sucked. Thankfully, we wound up nearly tripling his money not long thereafter.)

Finally, most recently, we raised $2m to finance a huge vision for en*theos. Investors include some REALLY cool humans—from the former CEO of AOL to my brother who put in his entire 401k. Long story short, our idea(s) + vision were pretty good and we got up to $1m+ of rev, but it became clear we were on the wrong path and trying to do too many things. We re-booted the entire biz—bringing our rev back to $0 (gasp) as we simplified and re-started. Again, freaked some people out (including myself—hah!).

At that stage, I KNEW all great projects involve a pivot or three from my own experience and studies (see Google, PayPal, etc.) and via mentorship from my wise advisors but it was still scary. (Good news there: We profitably doubled our membership numbers in the first 12 months with the new, focused model and our business is WAY (!!!) better.)

Pivots. They’re part of the process.

At the most challenging moments we need to KNOW this, maintain intense trust in our abilities (see Confidence 101!) to handle whatever life throws at us, lock down our fundamentals so we’re stabilized, and take the next step in discovery.

Here’s to many more heroic pivots—each navigated with more grace and trust and power!

As it turns out, this is a great formula for moving in the direction of any calling: find what you love and what the world needs, then combine them. As Frederick Buechner wrote, ‘Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’
Jeff Goins

True Mastery

“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.’

Mastery isn’t about straight As or the highest salary in the company. It’s not even about being the most popular in your field. It’s about understanding your potential and then dedicating your life to pursuing that ideal. It means doing your absolute best. Why? Because the craft deserves it, because the calling requires it, and because maybe you’ll be a better person for it. After all, 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.”

True mastery.

It’s all about approaching our entire lives as our creative work—our masterpiece. From how we show up in our craft to how we show up with our family and communities.

“It’s about understanding your potential and then dedicating your life to pursuing that ideal.”

Let’s do that.

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.
Jeff Goins

About the author

Authors

Jeff Goins

Author, Blogger, Speaker
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