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

You can’t find your passion if you don’t push through pain. That’s what I learned from Jody Noland and what Viktor Frankl’s research revealed: discovery comes with dedication. We must seek to understand our suffering with a redemptive worldview, choosing to see the greater good in spite of the evil in this world. Otherwise, the challenges we encoun

When you are stuck fulfilling an obligation instead of chasing a dream, you aren’t your best self.

Charles Handy once said in an interview: “If you groan about your job or find it has become monotonous and boring, you need to ask yourself—what do you secretly want to do? Do it. You can have a breakpoint and reinvent yourself. Sensible people reinvent themselves every ten years.”6

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.

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.”7

Life has a funny way of teaching us that sometimes the most important stuff is the ordinary stuff. The smallest moments, the ones we think are insignificant, are the ones we will cherish the most.

Take time to look back at all you’ve experienced, and listen to what your life is saying. Invite mentors into your life to help you discern the call. This is the perfect opportunity to identify a thread, some common theme that ties everything together.

“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.

“The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us,” she wrote, “that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done.” If we could make this change and think of work the same way we think of play, treating it as something we do for pleasure

Sometimes, a calling is simply accepting your role in a story that is bigger than you. So when my friend asked what kind of writer I wanted to be, I said the most natural thing that came to mind: “I want to be the kind of writer I’m supposed to be.