Body of Work
Page 4
This element of support from people who have been through it before is the core ingredient in Dan’s latest venture, his website Clarity.fm, which connects entrepreneurs with questions to experts who have answers. Dan’s vision is to reach a billion people in the next ten years with this “instant mentoring” startup.
After I glean the lesson and the root from this experience, how will I release the shame attached to it?
You may not find meaning or lessons in every unwanted ingredient. However, it is important to release any shame that comes from the experience, or it will hinder your ability to feel confident and powerful in your life.
Brené Brown is a shame and vulnerability researcher who wrote the bestselling book Daring Greatly. In the book, she describes a moment an audience member at her speaking engagement had a breakthrough about dealing with shame.
“I get it,” he sighed.
“We all have shame. We all have good and bad, dark and light, inside of us. But if we don’t come to terms with our shame, our struggles, we start believing that there’s something wrong with us—that we’re bad, flawed, not good enough—and even worse, we start acting on those beliefs. If we want to be fully engaged, to be connected, we have to be vulnerable. In order to be vulnerable, we need to develop resilience to shame.”
Ingredients in a project-based world
In the new world of work, almost everything we do can be broken down into projects.
The first ninety days of a new job is a project.
The creation of a new product is a project.
Producing an event is a project.
Preparing for a promotion is a project.
Conducting a fund-raising campaign for a nonprofit is a project.
Merging two companies is a project.
With each new project in your career, you have the opportunity to both leverage your diverse ingredients as well as develop new ones.
You don’t have to use all your ingredients in every life situation. Each unique aspect of your life can be considered a recipe.
You can mix the skill of teaching, the experience of being a babysitter, and the values of love and stability in your recipe for being a good parent.
You can mix the skill of writing with the experience of being a marathon runner and the value of humor in your recipe for writing a book.
You can mix the skill of carpentry and your experience as a member of your church with your values of social justice in your recipe for volunteering with Habitat for Humanity.
HOW INGREDIENTS COME TOGETHER
Charlie Gilkey is a writer, business coach, former army logistics officer in the Iraq War, and PhD candidate in philosophy. He writes at productiveflourishing.com. He wrote this essay to describe how his ingredients of “entrepreneur,” “warrior,” and “philosopher” fit together.
. . . . . .
One of the questions that has come from a lot of my interviews lately is about how my background of philosophy, military service, and entrepreneurship converges. I’ve always been intrigued by that question, largely because of how many preconceptions people have about each of the three.
Specifically, though, people have found the most tension between my military and philosopher identities. It normally goes like this: “How does a philosopher end up in the army?” Deconstruction: How does a cerebral, abstract thinker end up in the dirty, practical profession of military leadership?
I’m sure it won’t be the last time I’ll say it, but here goes: My mission is really to advance human “flourishing.” The way that I understand philosophy is that it’s the search for understanding how to thrive in the world, at both the personal and societal level. It’s not just what it means for me to flourish and how to do it but what it means for us to flourish and how we might go about that. Last, it’s been my experience, observation, and reflection that most of what really matters isn’t a matter of knowing, but, rather, taking meaningful action on the stuff that matters.
If you’re really out to advance human flourishing, there’s an unfortunate fact of the world that you must come to grips with: it so turns out that, in this world, there’s a lot of human suffering. To countervail those forces, you need a wide mixture of responses—social, political, religious, economic, and military.
At the same time, different conditions require different responses.
I understand that there are considerable differences of thought on this issue and I’ve spent nigh two decades preparing for it, living it, or reflecting about it—but being a warrior and being a philosopher aren’t as incompatible as many make it seem. Just as there are many ways to be a doctor or a teacher, there are many ways to be a warrior and a philosopher. The simplified stereotypes we receive or perpetuate rob of us of the richness of understanding we may get to upon further reflection.
My time in the military has passed—I’ve long since “laid down that shield”—yet the warrior in me is still alive and thriving. The more I’m removed from my prior service, the prouder, honored, and appreciative I become of it. I understand how critical every bit of it has led me to where I am.
If philosophy addresses the why of what I do, my military service and my current profession addresses how I go about doing that. My field of action is now more directly social and economic since I see that it’s the best fit for my talents and mission. There’s a high degree of transference of skills and perspectives from what I’ve done before to what I’m doing now.
Exercise: Determine Your Ingredients
Step 1: Assess your ingredients.
Brainstorm answers in each of the six categories of ingredients:
Roles
Which job roles have you fulfilled?
Skills
Which measurable skills do you have? Where did you learn them?
Strengths
Which strengths come naturally to you?
Experience
What kinds of work situations have you been in?
What kinds of life experiences have you had?
Values
What do you believe in? Why?
Scars
Which life situations have brought you to your knees?
What did you learn from those situations?
Step 2: Build context around your ingredients.
Review your list and highlight:
Which ingredients are you most excited by and proud of?
Which ingredients do you want to use in your next project?
Which ingredients do you feel embarrassment or shame about?
Answer these three questions about those ingredients that cause you to feel shame:
1. What lesson did I learn from this experience?
2. How does this lesson strengthen or reinforce my roots?
3. After I glean the lesson and the root from this experience, how will I release the shame attached to it?
Step 3: Determine the ingredients you are excited to learn next.
Which skills do you want to learn?
What experience do you want to gain?
Which new project could you create that would allow you to develop specific ingredients?
Your ingredients are going to play a critical role in the remaining parts of this book as you begin to build your body of work by choosing a work mode, creating and innovating, surfing your fear, collaborating, establishing your definition of success, and selling your story. Hold tight to your ingredients and be proud of what makes you unique.
To see examples of people’s ingredient lists, including creative ways to describe and display them, go to pamelaslim .com/bodyofwork and click on the “Ingredients” chapter.
CHAPTER 4
Choose Your Work Mode
But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
&n
bsp; And in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labor is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.
—Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
I was standing in a dusty courtyard in an improvised city on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, spinning a four-year-old child upside down. He was giggling, which made the other eighty kids in line giggle too. After three spins, I put him down, he ran to the back of the line, and the next kid stepped up and jumped into my arms.
At that moment, as much as I loved swinging eighty cute Colombian kids in circles every morning, I wondered if my true career path was as an expatriate aid worker.
It was my senior year in college, and I was completing my bachelor’s degree in international service and development, with a focus in nonformal adult education. I had always had a passion for grassroots development and social change. I loved the people and culture of Latin America, so I planned on having a career living abroad.
But the more I studied the field and got direct experience with it by interning in development projects, the more I felt that my role was not as an expatriate aid worker (which is better served by host nationals) but rather should be in my own country, supporting change from within.
Starting at age twenty, I became obsessed with the Afro-Brazilian martial art form of capoeira. After training hard for a year, I took over as volunteer executive director of Omulu Capoeira Group in the Bay Area, and for the next ten years I ran the organization, including its marketing, grant writing, fund-raising, program development, and public relations. We started a youth program, Community Action Project, with one student, Jimmy Jarquin, and over the next number of years, partnering with more than twenty youth service organizations in the area, grew it to two hundred kids. I co-taught a class at San Francisco State University in the Dance Ethnology department with my teacher, Mestre Preguiça. We took groups of students on study tours to Brazil, where we visited capoeira schools all over the country.
Upon graduation from college, I took a job as a program assistant for the Marin Community Foundation, a large foundation endowed with millions of dollars. In that role, I got to see how many different organizations were structured and funded, and learned about philanthropy.
Wanting to get my feet wet in direct service, my next job was at the Exploratorium, a San Francisco art and science museum that I had loved since I was a child. I worked in the teacher-training program and got to see the design and delivery of a program up close.
My next leap was into software training and development, in an “only in San Francisco” firm that was owned by a commune and operated out of Victorian homes in the Haight-Ashbury district. It was there that I was exposed to corporate software training and had my first peek into the field of training and development. I opened the South of Market training facility, then ran the backend of the training business.
When the company began to falter, I moved to Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors, which after a merger became Barclays Global Investors. It was my first experience in a purely corporate environment, and I loved it. I gazed out at the San Francisco skyline from the twenty-ninth floor and treasured my fresh pencils and endless supply of Post-it Notes. I worked in training and development, and I loved learning new things every day from the financial traders, analysts, and administrative staff. I built management and technical training programs to keep pace with explosive staffing growth and took advantage of learning all about corporate training and development from my bosses and exceptionally gifted mentors.
But, quite suddenly, when I turned thirty and got pneumonia (perhaps from ten years of working ninety-plus-hour weeks), I decided to quit my job cold turkey. August 15, 1996, was the last time I collected a paycheck as a corporate employee.
For the next nine years, I worked as a management consultant in some of the most well-known organizations in the world. I worked in every kind of workplace situation you can imagine, from helping organizations grow (during boom cycles) to helping them shrink (during downturns). I worked with senior executives, frontline managers, salespeople, engineers, and designers. I would joke with my clients that there was an endless need for my services, since as soon as you put more than one person together in a company you had a dysfunctional organization.
After so many invigorating years as a consultant in larger organizations and seeing how many corporate employees were dying to quit their jobs to start a business, I was ready to work with individual clients. I trained as a coach with Martha Beck and began to think about making the transition from consultant to coach.
When I met my husband and moved to Arizona, we knew we wanted to have kids, so I didn’t want to be on the road all the time as a consultant. After my son was born, I took a class on online marketing with Suzanne Falter, and built my online platform, which became the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog, book, and coaching business. Over eight years, I coached people all over the world in their transition from employee to entrepreneur. I began to speak at conferences, write books, and work with corporate partners to develop content for the small-business market.
In retrospect, and truly without a plan, I realized that I had covered just about every work mode: nonprofit volunteer, nonprofit employee, small-business employee, corporate employee, stay-at-home mom, freelancer, consultant, small-business owner, and independent producer.
Since I have gotten tremendous growth and satisfaction from each of these work modes, I believe very strongly that there is no one right way to work; there is only the path that brings you great satisfaction and allows you to build a body of work that you are proud to share with the world.
Learning about different work modes will give you more stability and a wider variety of options in an increasingly uncertain global economy.
Work modes in the new world of work
The last twenty years have brought massive revolution to the way we work. Where telecommuting was a novelty a decade ago, now entire industries have sprung up around Internet business models that have customers, suppliers, and producers distributed all over the world.
In a study conducted by software company Intuit in 2010 and cited by NextSpace CEO Jeremy Neuner, it is predicted that by 2020, more than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce will be so-called contingent workers. That is more than 60 million people.
In a twenty-first-century economy, people move between many organizations, jobs, and business environments. Change, flux, and continual upheaval are the new normal.
But most people are not aware of the many ways they can apply their various talents to different work modes in order to earn a living while creating a meaningful body of work.
A laid-off corporate employee may have highly valuable skills that he can use to work on freelance projects while he looks for a new full-time position. A worn-out small-business owner may not realize that her skills could be extremely valuable within a larger organization, where she could put them to use without continually hustling for new customers, and feel the relief of a regular paycheck.
This list of work modes will continue to grow and evolve with innovations and changes in the economy:
Employee
You work for someone else for a wage and benefits.
Contractor
You work for yourself, or for an agency, often for a primary employer or project.
Freelancer
You work for yourself, doing a variety of projects for a variety of clients.
Small-Business Owner
You own a specific online or brick-and-mortar business, where you develop and sell products and services to a specific market.
Startup Founder with Funding
You develop a specific product with great market potential and go after angel or venture- capital funding.
Social Entrepreneur
You own a business that has an explicit social agenda, often using the profits, or
a portion of profits, generated by the enterprise to fund projects that support social good.
Independent Producer
You are an artist (including fine arts, photography, music, writing, and more), and you raise funds through a combined source of crowdsourcing (like Kickstarter or Indiegogo), or by selling your wares on sites like Behance or Etsy. You may also be lucky enough to have a patron, or a corporate sponsor.
Nonprofit Professional
You are a freelancer or an employee of a nonprofit organization.
Unofficial Confederation Member
In the new world of work, many independent professionals, such as coaches, Web developers, programmers, writers, and graphic designers, gather together to work on projects, in addition to work they do independently. Often there is no official business or organization structure, just deep trust and confidence in each other’s abilities, and sales capability within the confederation to pitch big projects.
Internet Personality
The rise of advertising on YouTube has opened the door for individuals with compelling (depending on who you ask) personalities. The New York Times estimates that Jenna Marbles, who they called “The Woman With 1 Billion Clicks,” could have earned as much as $346,827.12 in 2012.
Multipotentialites
As a coach for many hundreds of clients, I noticed that there was a certain kind of person who not only had a huge amount of unique “ingredients” but who also felt extremely boxed in whenever we would talk about choosing a particular kind of career or business or work mode.
Thanks to Emilie Wapnick, I now know that these folks are called multipotentialites.
Emilie coined the term to refer to a person who has many interests and talents and often works in a mixture of the work modes previously described.