Have you ever asked questions such as ‘what is my purpose in this life?’, ‘what is my true calling?’, ‘what is my true passion?’, etc… I certainly have, and it has been really hard to find answers to these questions.
In ‘The Art of Work’, Jeff Goins provides some guidance in helping finding one’s calling. The book contains seven different chapters. Each chapter tells, at least, one person story and talks about a specific theme. There are then, seven themes (awareness, apprenticeship, practice, discovery, profession, mastery, legacy) that shouldn’t be seen as steps, but rather as overlapping stages.
Let’s dig in…
Awareness
“You don’t “just know” what your calling is. You must listen for clues along the way, discovering what your life can tell you. Awareness comes with practice”
- What’s easy for you? One way of knowing what your calling is, is finding something that seems easy to us, but doesn’t seem easy to others.
- Difference between happiness and meaning. According to Viktor Frankl, there are three things that give meaning to life: a project, a significant relationship and a redemptive view of suffering. We should stop trying to be happy and instead focus on things that mean something above ourselves. Do things that are required of us.
- How to approach fear. Fear can distract us from working on our calling. The fear of failing should not stop us from answering the calling. Going for that calling and failing is much better than not trying.
- Lack of clarity. You must have faith that you are called to something, even if you don’t know what it is. The purpose will not come find you and it will not be clear, you must believe that it’s out there and go and find it. The clarity will come with action.
- Listen to your life. Your life and previous experiences might show you what your calling is. If you listen carefully, a spark might occur. The author suggests an exercise to look at major events in life and write them down on a piece of paper. Without trying to decode the meaning, look for a common thread, some recurring theme. How does one event influence another? What ties all together.
- Commitment. You must commit and have perseverance to what you believe is the calling. Some times we will commit to the wrong thing, but that’s better than doing nothing. The risk of not committing is greater than the cost of making the wrong choice.
Apprenticeships
“You cannot find your calling on your own. It is a process that involves a team of mentors. And everywhere you look, help is available.”
Confirmation. Sometimes you might have an instinct of doing a step towards your calling, but you will have uncertainty. What makes a difference on making a difficult decision is having an affirming voice (of someone you trust) telling you what you know to be true but still need to hear.
There is no success without help. Stories of success are stories of a community. Finding a calling needs the aid and assistance of others. We will never find a calling on our own. We all need help.
Accidental apprenticeships. Apprenticeship opportunities are out there in unexpected places and you must listen to be able to recognize them. Examples of long-lost relatives, old relationships may become the sources of inspirations that you need.
Legacy. A good mentor is not the one that just gives you the skill. Is the one that gives you the skill so you can master it and then multiply it.
Practice
“Your calling is not always easy. It will take work. Practice can teach you what you are and not meant to do.”
Talent doesn’t exist. You should trust practice instead of talent. There are not talented people, there are people who have practiced a lot, in an effective way. Excellence is a matter of practice, not talent.
Growth mindset. There are a couple of mindsets: fixed and growth mindset. With a growth mindset, your potential is unlimited. You can always get better.
Type of practice. It’s not just about the time you spend practicing, but about the quality of the practice that is done. Deliberate practice states that the path to excellence have different characteristics, and time is just one of them (10k hours of practice).
Is not fun. If you can do something when it’s not fun, even when you are exhausted and bored and want to give up, then it just might be your calling. The only way to know the difference between a hobby and a calling is to put yourself through the crucible of painful practice.
Discoverability. A true practice is not just about learning something. You must invest the time and energy to discern if that is what you were meant to do. What resonates and what not. It is never too late to take a turn in the direction of your true calling.
Discovery
“Discovering your calling is not an epiphany but a series of intentional decisions. It looks less like a giant leap and move like building a bridge.”
The discovery formula. Combine what you love and what the world needs to get closer to move to the direction of your calling.
Not an epiphany, a process. Your calling doesn’t just arrive one day, quite the opposite is a journey that requires leaving what you know in search of what you don’t know.
Three stages. First, you hear the call (the author suggests to be a mentee to learn what a calling looks like from mentors and predecessors). It might sound different to every person. Second, we respond to that call by acting, by taking a next step. Lastly, you begin to believe. So, the calling becomes when we are not prepared and ready, we then take a next step that will open new opportunities, and then we start believing in that calling.
Just do it. The worst mistake one can do is just fantasize and think about their dream, without doing anything. We shouldn’t save all of our energy for a leap instead of building a bridge incrementally. The path to one’s dream is more about following a direction than arriving at a destination.
Profession
“It will take a few tries before you get your calling right. Failure isn’t what prevents us from success, then. It’s what leads us there.”
Get your calling wrong. There is room to get your calling wrong. One must persevere to find their dream. Your life work is found through failure.
Pivoting. Pivoting should not be considered as a failure. In fact, the ability to try new directions and listen the lessons of it if it doesn’t go as we expected is how we get to our calling. We need more action.
The hidden message of failure. Sometimes we don’t pivot in the direction of personal success but towards even greater pain. But a calling will always lead you to a life that matters, one you can be proud of.
Mastery
“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.”
Portfolio life. A way to find your calling is to have a portfolio of work. Do diverse things that set up your identity. All these activities, when combined, lead to the greatest satisfaction and the best work.
Four areas that make up your portfolio life.
- Work: In all jobs, you will be growing and every new experience contributes to your portfolio.
- Home: What makes the journey of finding your calling worthwhile is having someone to share your passion with.
- Play: What we do for the pure love of the activity (for example cooking), play is what keeps our lives, and our work, interesting.
- Purpose: Without a why behind the what you do, your career becomes meaningless and ultimately useless.
State of flow. We must see our work as a means of making us better, not just richer. There is a mental state, called ‘flow’, that is the intersection of what one is good at and what one finds challenging. You know that what you need to do is possible, even difficult, and then you feel part of something larger. This sounds like calling.
Legacy
“Your calling is not a job. It is your entire life.”
Having a goal. In order to achieve a dream, we must know what the dream is. We need to set some type of goal. For example, instead of saying I want to be rich, one should say, I want to make $1M/year. That way we can start finding ways to get there.
A legacy for the present moment. We shouldn’t focus on whether I will live long enough or when we will retire, instead we should see legacy as what we can do with what we have right now. For example, if being generous and giving to others is what matters to us, we shouldn’t wait to make a lot of money during 10 years, so we can give it away in the next 10. We should make giving to others our purpose right now.
Insignificant moments matter. Life has a lot of small moments that we just let pass by in the search of our calling. This is a mistake. There is purpose in the times where your toddler interrupts your research call. A calling doesn’t compete with your ordinary life. A life, when lived well, becomes one’s calling. Their magnum opus.
Identity. We can either do what is expected of us, or listen to that voice of intuition deep inside promising something more significant. One have everything they need to become their whole self. It’s a choice. A calling is accepting our role in a story that is bigger than us.
What I learnt from this book
I enjoyed this book. The author (as expected) doesn’t provide a scientific method to find one’s calling, but is able to explain key concepts through different people’s stories. I like this approach because it makes the concepts be more tangible, and less theoretical.
Because I don’t have really good memory, when I read a book, I like taking one lesson away from it. In this book, I want to say that the lesson is that a calling is not an epiphany. We should see the calling as something that we can build and reach by taking action. We can’t stay thinking about our dream, instead we must act. Take small steps, pivot, discover, fail and keep finding the intersections between what the world needs and what one’s interests are.
