The Art of Work by Jeff Goins [Book Summary]

7 min readApr 18, 2019

We often ask ourselves, “What is our purpose?” “What is our calling? “What am I gonna do with my life?” And answering those questions are not that simple.

In his book, The Art of Work, Jeff Goins provided a clear framework from discerning our calling, developing our mastery and maximizing our impact.
Each chapter is based on the theme :

Let us start digging into it.

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”

The first step in discovering your calling is awareness. Without awareness, you won’t be able to recognize opportunities to come. One way of knowing our gifting is when something seems easy for us doesn’t seem easy to others.

Clarity comes with action. Awareness doesn’t just happen, it must be cultivated. Look at the major events in your life and write it down. Note everything significant you can remember. Look for common thread or pattern.

God wastes nothing. As you explore your own calling, you will be surprised by how your previous experiences are conspiring to lead you in the right direction of your life’s work.

Discovery comes with dedication. You cannot find your passion if you don’t push thru the pain. Committing to the wrong thing is better than standing still

Failure is a friend dressed up like an enemy. This means if we want true satisfaction, we have to rise above our own desire and do what is required of us.

Listen to your life. — Jeff Goins

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.”

An apprenticeship was an excellent way of learning a skill under the guidance of someone wise and more experience.

There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every success story is a story of community.

The best way is to see the one that’s already there. Every place you go, every person you meet, every job you have is a chance to gain clarity in your self-education.

Rarely that you find all the elements of an apprenticeship in one place. Accidental apprenticeship is a series of unexpected incidents and unlikely mentors that created the opportunity to grow.

The lesson of Accidental Apprenticeship is that long before the person is ready for his calling, life is preparing that person for the future through chance encounters and serendipitous experience.

Sometimes all it takes to make a difficult decision as an affirming voice telling you what you know to be true but still need to hear. — Jeff Goins

Practice

“Your calling is not always easy. It will take work. Practice can teach you what you are and not meant to do.”

Nobody reaches expert status without intense preparation. Excellence is a matter of practice, not talent. According to Geoff Colvin, talent is overrated. Talent means nothing like what we think it means. If indeed, it means anything at all.

Expert status can be achieved by adopting a growth mindset ( Mindset, Carol Dweck) and thru deliberate practice that leads to expert performance (K. Anders). The right kind of practice is a process of repeated tasks that ends in failure. ( The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle)

It can be painful. Success is a process of persevering through difficulties but it’s also about knowing yourself.

Rarely do easy and greatness goes together. If you love what you do, even when it hurts then you may have more than a hobby. — Jeff Goins

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.”

Great formula for mowing in the direction of calling: Find what you love and what the world needs and combine them.

The worst mistake you can make. We save all our energy for the leap instead of building a bridge. The way we make way. from dreams into reality is through small intentional steps

Don’t take leap, build a bridge. The beauty of the bridge is that you don’t have to see too far ahead in order to get to the other side. You have to take the next step.

“I don’t know what to do.” — a simple phrase which means “We want our journey to be safe.” The path to your dream is more about following a direction than arriving at the destination. One that requires you to leave what you know in search of what you didn’t know.

You can always change directions once you get the car. Don’t squander your time, holding out for someone else to give you permission to start.

We think that passion comes from our desire as primary, but if we are truly called, the work always comes before we are ready. — Jeff Goins

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.”

A pivot is powerful because it takes away all your excuses. Pivoting isn’t plan B; it’s part of the process.

Pain is the great teacher and failure a faithful mentor. Successful people and organization don’t succeed in spite of failure, they succeed because of it.

Be patient. When we feel farthest from our purpose, we are actually already on the path, headed in the right direction.

A calling is not merely moment. It’s a lifestyle, a constant progression of submitting to a larger purpose.

Sometimes we don’t pivot in the direction of personal success but toward even greater pain. A calling will always lead you to life that matters, one you can be proud of.

Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done. — Robert Greene, Mastery

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.”

Having a portfolio life. We are multifaceted creature with many varied interests. The basic idea is that instead of thinking your work as a monolithic activity, you choose to see it as a complex group of interests, passions, and activities.

Four Areas That Make Up Your Portfolio Life

Work. Having a portfolio mindset toward work will make you a better-rounded person and set up for success in this new economy. It can be your fee work, salary,
Home. What makes the journey of vocation worthwhile is having someone to share your passion with.
Play. We all have things we do for the pure love of the activity, regardless of whether they ever provide an income.
Purpose. There must be something bigger than what you do that guides through the choices you make, the risks you take and the opportunities you pursue.

Aim for mastery. What you do with your portfolio life is your gift to the world. Understand your potential and then dedicate your life pursuing the ideal.

Get in the flow. As defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the intersection of what you are good at and what challenges you — where difficulty and competency meet. When your competency exceeds the difficulty of a task, you are bored. When difficulty exceeds your competency, you are anxious. The Feeling in the state of flow: “You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even when difficult, and sense of time disappear. You forget yourself. You feel part of something larger.”

Calling is a gift. Our responsibility is not to hoard our gifts but to use them in challenging ways so that others can benefit.

Don’t search for your calling. Explore, try new things, keep your feet moving. Something will grab you. It will call you. — Jody Maberry

Legacy

“Your calling is not a job. It is your entire life.”

Success isn’t the goal; legacy is. The question of legacy isn’t a matter of if you live long enough or when you retire; it’s a matter you will do with what you have right now. It was never a question of if. It was always a matter of when.

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

Finding a calling is a journey of becoming. A calling is simply accepting your role in a story that is bigger than you.

Your calling is a lifestyle, not an event. We think that our calling will give us “bang” in our life. But it isn’t. Often, our calling isn’t something new and shiny. It’s something old and predictable and easily taken for granted. But sometimes it takes a wake up call for us to see that this work that we’re doing is more significant than we realize.

Life is not a support system for your work; your work is the support system for your life. — Stephen King

Book Mentioned in the Book

My Personal Favorite Quote of the Book

Clarity comes with action.

Originally published at https://www.briandelacruz.net on April 18, 2019. Find the article useful? Subscribe to our free newsletter at https://www.briandelacruz.net/free-newsletter/.