Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

passion

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. By Gregg Levoy

by Leave a Comment

Wow. This is a very thought-provoking book about the various aspects of finding your passion in the world.

Callings

From paying attention to the voice in our heads, to having the courage to act upon that voice, and the journey that it often takes to get there. Gregg is a bright guy that has so much to say about this topic and how hard it was for him to find his passion that ultimately led to his life writing this book, doing passion retreats, and speaking around the world. As I try to summarize this book I am skimming the 100’s of sentences and paragraphs that I have highlighted looking for nuggets to share here.

If you have read my blogs you’ll see how serendipity and trusting hunches is important to me and in Callings, he devotes a chapter to synchronicity, another way to create luck in your search for your new career path. Synchronicity is a coincidence…a meaningful coincidence that can inform us, primarily through intuition. A few times Gregg was on one of his journey’s looking for a change in work (to find that passion), he would find a Queen of Hearts playing card. One of his friends said it was telling him he was on the right path. I love those stories.

This book is a journey and one that I encourage you to take if you find yourself searching for something better. My book is filled with highlights and notes and my morning journal has even more thoughts from this book scattered throughout.

Vital Signs: Discovering and Sustaining Your Passion for Life. Gregg Levoy

by Leave a Comment

Maine Career Development Association brought Gregg in for our conference May 2017 and he was our best speaker in years, maybe of all ~12 years we have been chartered. I was fortunate to pick him up at the airport and a few of us went out to dinner with him.

Vital Signs is a reflection of much of his current thinking. This is deep. Very thoughtful. Even historical. And at times a reflection of Gregg’s own pursuit of passion in life. The biggest difference in this book from Callings is that Callings was about work and this one is more about life. (Again, Gregg is a Boomer and going thru this thinking himself right now).

[Read more…] about Vital Signs: Discovering and Sustaining Your Passion for Life. Gregg Levoy

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. By Angela Duckworth

by Leave a Comment

“To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.”

Grit looks at what makes successful people, raw talent or passion and perseverance. Angela has tons of research that looks at this question and has created a Grit Scale to determine how much “grit” a person has. It appears that perseverance is the key factor in determining success. She found that people who graduated with a 2 year college degree scored slightly higher than people with a 4 year degree. What? Turns out that the drop out rate at 2 year colleges is much higher so that people who actually DO graduate must have more grit.

It is a book filled with quotes like “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.” and “years of hard work are often mistaken for innate talent, and that passion is as necessary as perseverance to work-class excellence.”

Other key factors are that each person must have a parent, teacher, or other adult who believes in their potential and tells them and supports them.

I love her story about Warren Buffet’s 3 step process of focusing on a smaller number of important goals in order to be successful. First, you write down 25 career goals. Second, you circle the top five highest-priority goals. Third, you look at all the rest of the goals and avoid them at all costs because they distract you and eat away at your time / energy. Wow… focusing your efforts is a key piece to this ‘grit’ thing I guess.

The ‘paragons of grit’ all have 4 things in common. An interest in the topic, long periods of practice, with a purpose that what you do matters. I feel like this is why I love the career field so much. It clearly has all four of these to keep me going and learning. The fourth one is hope. Hope is defined in all of the three above. It is what keeps you going even when things are difficult.

Another of the key ingredients is that action is required. If you know me, you’ll know that I speak to this all the time in my “intentional serendipity” philosophy. You must take action in order to learn. Turns out you need to take action in order to develop your interests as well.

This book has been a thoughtful journey as I work with clients who are looking for passion in a job. I don’t think passion comes first as much as it comes from hard work.

Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a monthly newsletter for career practitioners. Peak-Careers offers discussion-based online seminars for career practitioners focused on meeting continuing education needs for GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

Sign up for our monthly newsletter at www.Peak-Careers.com