CHAPTER 3

Name Your Ingredients

Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.

—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

For years, David Batstone and his wife dined regularly at an Indian restaurant near their home in the San Francisco Bay Area. A professor of Sustainable Business at the University of San Francisco and a longtime human rights advocate, David was shocked to learn that the owner of his favorite restaurant was a human trafficker.

“Unbeknownst to us, the staff at Pasand Madras Indian Cuisine who cooked our curries, delivered them to our table, and washed our dishes were slaves,” he said.

As David recounted in his book Not for Sale, he learned the horrifying truth about the restaurant owner through a news story about two young women who were found unconscious in their apartment after they were poisoned by carbon monoxide leaking from a broken heating vent. After the police arrived on the scene, it was quickly revealed that the landlord, who was also the owner of the Indian restaurant, was a major human trafficker.

Overwhelmed with the horror in his own backyard, David was inspired to take off a year from his work as an investor and university professor to explore the issue of global human trafficking.

“I place a high value on curiosity,” he said. “I thought, ‘How can this happen, and how prolific is it in the world?’ So I read everything I could get my hands on and spent a year visiting every continent to see human trafficking up close.”

One stop on his global tour was northern Thailand, where he met a woman who had rescued twenty-seven children from the commercial sex trade. She was sheltering the kids in a hut built with palm leaves and a dirt floor. David said, “I was amazed by her courage and dedication. She had no plan, no support, and no infrastructure. And yet she had made a huge difference.”

Moved to help, David took the most common first step of most humanitarian efforts. He founded a nonprofit called Not For Sale and raised funds to build a village to house the rescued children.

By the time he reached his fund-raising goal, the original twenty-seven kids had grown to one hundred and thirty.

The more he dug into the issue, the more David realized that new approaches were needed if human slavery was to be completely eradicated.

“Pulling drowning people out of a river is compassion. Justice is walking upstream to solve the reasons they are falling in,” he said.

Drawing on his background in business and investing, the Not For Sale team began to work on social ventures to generate jobs and income in the communities most affected by human trafficking.

“For twenty-five years, I had a very bifurcated or tripolar existence. I had academic skills; I was an investor, working for a bank; I was a journalist; and I had human rights impulses to help the poor. My worlds were very separate. Until Not For Sale, I lived a siloed existence,” he said. “When we have so many divergent interests, people often think we are unfocused, therefore ineffective. They buy into the ‘specialty mode’ ethos, where you are only valued if you have deep expertise in one area. I never saw my multiple interests as a problem. I saw the threads in my story. It was a natural, logical quilt. Not For Sale was the first time I could bring all of my worlds together—university professor, journalist, investor, and human rights activist.”

While David’s dedication to the cause of ending human slavery in this century is inspiring, it is his particular set of ingredients that make his work so effective.

What are ingredients?

We often describe ourselves primarily by the title of our profession or the name of our degree.

“This is Mike. He is an operations manager.”

“This is Farah. She has a PhD from Harvard.”

“This is Lee. She is a stay-at-home mom.”

These descriptions communicate one aspect of our lives at a particular point in time. But there are infinite other parts to each of us that add competence, distinction, emotional depth, strength, and meaning to the way we live each and every day.

I call these other parts our ingredients.

Our ingredients are the skills, strengths, experiences, identity, and knowledge that we have gained throughout the course of our lives.

They are what make us uniquely capable and interesting.

While Mike Bruny’s business card might state that he is an operations manager for Intel, you may not know that he is also:

All of these ingredients make Mike a unique individual. (It may have been the combination of bow tie and emotional intelligence—plus his big smile—that made me spontaneously hug him the first time we met at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon).

Mike uses his ingredients in many distinct ways to develop a rich and interesting body of work. He founded a bow-tie line. He teaches people the art of conference networking in online classes. He acts as a conference ambassador. He represents his company at events celebrating black men and women who work in the technology sector.

You must go beyond your job description

We highlight small elements of our skill set and experiences in order to fit in to a particular job description or business niche.

The reality is that in order to create your body of work you must rely on all of your ingredients, even those that you might not consider relevant to your professional career.

How do you determine your ingredients?

Your ingredients can be grouped into six main categories.

Roles

Which job roles have you fulfilled? (Examples: salesperson, parent, martial artist.)

Skills

Which measurable skills do you have? (Examples: Ruby on Rails programming, Spanish, customer service, accounting.) Where did you learn them?

Strengths

Which strengths come naturally to you? (Examples: writing, selling, baking.)

Experience

What kinds of work situations (academic, corporate, nonprofit, entrepreneurial) have you been in?

What kinds of life experiences have you had? (Examples: study abroad, travel, wealthy parents, abusive relationships, health challenges.)

Values

What do you believe in? (Examples: mastery, justice, Second Amendment rights.) Why?

Scars

Which life situations have brought you to your knees? What did you learn from those situations? (Examples: heartbreak, financial disasters, personal embarrassments, illness or injury.)

When I asked David Batstone to name his ingredients, he came up with the following list.

Roles

Journalist

Investor

Professor

Human rights activist

Father

Husband

Skills

Intuition

Pattern recognition

Vision of what could be rather than what is

Ability to empower others in times of fragmentation or crisis

Ability to identify talent

Storytelling

Personal discipline

Delayed gratification

Planning

Memory

Values

Social intelligence

Curiosity

Conviction around spiritual values

As we have seen in David’s case, when you develop and integrate all of your available ingredients in your work, it becomes rich, deep, and very powerful.

In Not for Sale, David has created a strong antislavery movement by telling engaging stories, using his background in journalism. He has hired excellent staff, using his ability to identify talent. He has founded successful for-profit ventures (like REBBL tea) that benefit Not For Sale by using his investor and finance skills. He helps us diagnose and understand the incomprehensible horror of modern-day slavery, using his research in social enterprise. And he lives his conviction for spiritual values, a vision of what could be, and the discipline to get up every day and fight for justice for the most vulnerable people on earth.

Imagine what the world would be missing if David had followed the common belief that he should focus on only one small set of his ingredients in his work in order to succeed in his chosen field.

If your vision of your body of work involves a wide variety of jobs and passions, you will need to utilize your ingredients in many different ways and in different recipes.

How do you handle “unattractive” ingredients?

There are benefits to sprinkling ingredients like “Harvard graduate,” “former editor at Businessweek,” or “world-champion triathlete” onto your résumé or into your conversations. But what about the nonglamorous ingredients? Your losses, your failures, your past pain and suffering?

We’ve all been dealt some tough cards in our lives, some people far more than others.

No matter what the circumstances, your job is to create context and meaning around your ingredients so that you come at your body of work from a position of strength. We will talk a lot more about how to tell your story in chapter 9, so for now just focus on identifying and giving context to your complete list of ingredients.

There are three important parts to understanding your “unwanted” ingredients.

What lesson did I learn from this experience?

Some of my most powerful beliefs have come from negative experiences. My parents’ divorce led me to develop inner strength, initiative, and independence. A horrible relationship in my twenties led me to set clear boundaries and to never let anyone speak to me in an abusive manner.

For each negative experience you have had in your life, ask yourself, “What lesson did I learn from this experience?” These lessons become positive ingredients and sometimes your greatest strengths.

How does this lesson strengthen or reinforce my roots?

Challenging experiences are often the source of your roots.

Canadian entrepreneur Dan Martell became a millionaire in his midtwenties by selling his company, but he started his career with some tough circumstances.

“As a teenager, I grew up in a challenging environment. By the time I turned seventeen, I had been to jail twice for drug-related charges. At eighteen, I went to rehab and discovered computers. It saved my life. The reason Portage [rehab] worked for me was because all the staff were ex–drug addicts. They helped me climb out of a hole that they once found themselves in. That philosophy, that I learnt at an early age, is the reason why I spend so much time giving back. Getting support from those who’ve been through it before is why I’ve had success, in both business and in life.”

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.

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.