CHAPTER 1

Your Body of Work

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

—George Bernard Shaw

The white paint was peeling, and chunks of plaster were missing from the exterior walls. Most of the windows were broken. Rusted swings hung from an iron frame, and the tattered playground sat on twisted pieces of asphalt. Graffiti and trash littered the outside of the building.

For two decades, members of the small California coastal town of Port Costa, population 200, had walked and driven past the old fading schoolhouse without giving it a second thought. The town was a mix of antiques shops, aging homes, and old shipyard buildings, so a bit of decay did not seem out of the ordinary.

But my dad saw something else.

Under the cracked paint and broken windows, he saw a vibrant, rich community center.

“The first time I saw the Port Costa School, I knew it was made to be an institution of learning. It was supposed to be filled with people learning Spanish, or painting, or tap dancing,” my dad said.

The building had not been used as a school since 1966. And so despite having no plan, no experience with historic-building restoration, no construction skills, and no way to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to fix the school, my dad and Diane, my bonus mom (my term for stepmom), decided they would purchase the building.

The fact that my dad would take on such an audacious challenge was not a surprise to me. All my life, I had watched him embrace the craft of his photography, obsessing over the perfect shot. When I was in preschool, I attended city council meetings in San Anselmo, California, where for three years, he patiently worked to establish the state’s first curbside recycling program, in 1971.

After decades of observing my dad work, I realized that he was not just building a career (although he was a very successful professional photographer), he was not just being a volunteer (although he spent hundreds of hours of unpaid time on community projects), but he was creating a deep and rich body of work that not only had great meaning and significance to him but also created considerable change and value in his community. It didn’t really matter if a project was overwhelming, or even impossible; if it fit with his vision of what he wanted to create for himself and for the world, he embraced it. It was an inspiring lesson for me.

As I watched the global economy fall to pieces in 2007 and sink into deep recession for a solid six years after that, creating fear and stress and uncertainty in workers of all stripes, it dawned on me:

My dad just might hold the secret to thriving in the new world of work.

How do you make sense of your career in a work environment that no longer has any predictable career paths?

How do you create stability in a world that has no job security, uncertain markets, threats of terrorism, and a fiercely competitive global workforce?

How do you balance making a living with making time for family, health, and recreation?

How do you develop relationships with mentors when everyone is so busy?

How do you keep your skills relevant in a world that moves so quickly that companies are launched, or destroyed, in a day?

How do you plan for your financial future when you have no idea if your income stream will slow to a trickle, or even dry up completely if you get laid off or go through a difficult stage of business?

Standard career advice would say to get more education, work harder, and make yourself indispensable to your organization or customer base.

This advice made a lot of sense in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, this advice is incomplete.

I have spent the last twenty years coaching thousands of employees, executives, and entrepreneurs in a huge variety of industries. I have watched organizations start, grow, shrink, and implode. I have sat across the table from longtime employees and watched them get laid off. I have helped start hundreds of new companies.

From these experiences I know the following to be true:

No one is looking out for your career anymore. You must find meaning, locate opportunities, sell yourself, and plan for failure, calamity, and unexpected disasters. You must develop a set of skills that makes you able to earn an income in as many ways as possible.

The new world of work requires a new lens and skill set to ensure career success. You must create your own body of work as you toil in different organizational systems and structures.

When you view your career through the lens of an overarching body of work, you:

In my dad’s case, he was a professional photographer and journalist. He worked most of his career for Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), detouring for eight years to work for an oil company before returning to PG&E and staying until retirement.

He survived multiple layoffs through the decades—the most noteworthy when ten of the eleven staff members in his department were laid off, leaving him shell-shocked and alone in his office.

In such a volatile environment, he did some specific things:

My dad turned sixty-five in November 1999, making him eligible for retirement benefits. In December 1999, he was laid off with a severance package. To this day, at the age of seventy-eight, he still does freelance projects for PG&E.

Was my dad lucky? Very. But I think the fact that he always viewed his career as more than a straight and narrow path, and always as a more cumulative and connected body of work, saved him from layoffs, opened up new opportunities, and allowed him to feel great success and satisfaction in his life.

What exactly is a body of work?

As Daniel Pink wrote in Drive, “The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”

Your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect, and impact. For individuals, it is the personal legacy you leave at the end of your life, including all the tangible and intangible things you have created. Individuals who structure their careers around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will have a powerful body of work.

For organizations, it is the products, property, inventions, ideas, and value they share throughout the course of their existence. Organizations that structure their internal strategies around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will be more competitive and resilient.

Smiling and waving at your neighbor every morning as you get the paper can contribute to your bigger desire to see more civility and joy in the world.

My passion for and commitment to individual determination and transformation has led me from community development projects on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, to science and art education to teaching martial arts to corporate consulting to parenting to blogging to entrepreneur coaching and writing books. And it will take me in new directions in the future, without having to feel constrained by any one audience or business or job title.

A body of work is big and deep and complex. It allows you to experiment and play and change and test.

It supports creative freedom.

It includes obvious things, like books, software code, photographs, videos, process improvements, paintings, and stories.

And not-so-obvious things, like community development, love, movements, memories, and relationships.

Bodies of work often have big overarching themes, such as:

Solving complex problems—like David Batstone’s commitment to end human trafficking with his nonprofit advocacy organization, Not For Sale.

Building bridges—like Kai Dupé and his work to bridge the digital divide in technology for people of color.

Changing the world through powerful communication—like Nancy Duarte, who has changed the way business leaders create and deliver presentations.

Making the world more accessible to more people—like Glenda Watson Hyatt, the Canadian writer and motivational speaker with cerebral palsy who writes with her left thumb.

Strengthening the bond between parents and children—like Marilyn Scott-Waters, a children’s book author who has created a world of free paper toys at thetoymaker.com.

Each of these examples shows a deep commitment to a cause or problem that is bigger than any one job title or profession or business. And they can include a whole range of output, including writing, physical products, legal legislation, systems, speeches, books, conversations, and advocacy.

Focusing on building a body of work will give you more freedom and clarity to choose different work options throughout the course of your life, and you’ll be able to connect your diverse accomplishments, sell your story, and continually reinvent and relaunch your brand.

You won’t have to say things like “I am throwing away ten years of studying and practicing law if I start a yoga studio.”

(Don’t worry—your relatives will say it.)

Or “I am undermining my potential if I take a job as a barista” after you get laid off from your corporate job as a highly paid creative.

If your body of work is about creating beauty and art, why not make lovely images in latte foam while you retool for a new job?

It’s also possible to contribute to your body of work if you work in a cubicle inside a larger company.

While the organization may have amnesia about your contribution to its body of work, you know what you created and what you are capable of.

If you completed a huge, significant project, did a spectacular job, and it ended up getting shelved right before being launched, you still did all that work. It may not become part of the organization’s legacy, but it is part of yours.

That’s why they call it work

Much of today’s business literature is focused on short-term gains, hacks, tweaks, and quick wins.

Everyone wants the secret formula. Or the four-hour workweek. Or the easy life on the beach.

Viewing your life as a body of work is not a short-term game.

You want to focus on meaning, skill development, professional network development, craft and mastery. There is no one right answer for everyone.

When my neighbor across the street decided to enroll in an MBA program, she was concerned that her employer would feel it was distracting from her day job. So she didn’t tell them.

The mother of two small children, she left the house at 7:00 A.M., worked all day, got home to feed dinner to her kids, put them to bed at 8:00 P.M., then worked again until midnight. Then she got up at 4:00 A.M. and worked some more.

On weekends, her husband took the kids to the zoo or the aquarium or the park—or all three—while she did her homework.

There were many times when I would meet my neighbor in the middle of the street after both of us pulled into our driveways. I saw dark circles under her eyes and heard the strain in her voice. The fatigue in this kind of situation is so deep that you wonder if you will ever get out of it.

My neighbor graduated with a 4.0 GPA. And then she told her employer what she had been doing for the last two years. They were stunned that she was able to handle such outside responsibility and still do a great job at work.

My neighbor, her husband, and their kids sacrificed a lot so she could add marketable skills to her list of ingredients.

Was it a struggle? Absolutely. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

In the big picture, it is worth it to gain skills and experience that open up better opportunities and industries. She is now positioned to be much more competitive in the job market. And with her broad business skills, she may consult from home so she can spend more time with her kids.

It is not all about you

Focusing on your entire body of work rather than solely on a you-centric career has the additional benefit of helping you peer out from behind the curtain of anonymity.

I often run into clients who get anxiety thinking about what could happen if they gain exposure and notoriety.

What if I don’t have all the answers?

What if my life is not all together?

What if I have spinach in my teeth when I’m interviewed by Matt Lauer?

When you realize that your job is to contribute to your broader body of work, you can conjure up the following visualization:

Imagine you are standing up on a big stage with a large space in front of you. This space represents your body of work—the thing you care most about creating.

Now visualize many people staring directly at you in the form of big beams of light right at your head.

Now strap a mirror to your forehead.

Take all these beams of light and direct them from your head to the body of work in front of you.

Notice how the more people who are staring directly at you, the more illuminated and bright your body of work is?

Fame is fleeting.

Consistent impact over the course of your life on a body of work you care about deeply is legacy.

How do you build a body of work?

There are very specific skills and steps involved in creating a body of work.

These steps are as relevant to a recent college graduate as they are to a senior executive looking for a new challenge.

You will go through these steps at multiple points in your lifetime. They will change depending on your interests, needs, and life situation. For some people, goals will be set for the next one to three years. For others, for five to ten years. You should choose the time frame that works for you. Use the following steps to shape your body of work. Throughout the book, you’ll explore each step in more detail, with stories, case studies, tools, and personal reflections.

1. Define your root: Which ideas drive you emotionally? Whom do you want to help? What specific changes do you want to create in the world?

2. Name your ingredients: What are your skills, strengths, and ideas? Which life experiences make you unique, talented, and capable?

3. Choose your work mode: Think about the positions you’ve had in the past and how you work best. For this next stage of your career, do you want to be an employee, entrepreneur, or freelancer?

4. Create and innovate: What do you want to bring to life at this stage of your career?

5. Surf the fear: Define, understand, and manage your fears and anxieties. They are a key part of any endeavor.

6. Form your team: Gather a specific group of peers, mentors, and collaborators to help you reach your goals.

7. Define what success means to you: Identify specific, relevant, and meaningful financial and personal goals.

8. Sell your story: Tie it all together to create a compelling story to convince potential employers, clients, or partners why you are the perfect person for the mission.

Ready to get started?

Exercise: Body of Work

Imagine yourself many years in the future, on the last day of your life, looking back at the things that you created, developed, nurtured, and contributed. What, ideally, would you like to see?

What do you want to create?

Who do you want to help?

What drives you?

Have patience. It will serve you well on the rest of your journey.