Bob Griffiths - Do What You Love for the Rest of Your Life: A Practical Guide to Career Change and Personal Renewal

PREFACE

In 1988 I left a successful career on Wall Street to begin doing the things I love. Ive traveled light-years since then, from Wall Street to Broadway, professionally, and even farther in the truly important things of life. Ive never felt better physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

As with most significant and worthwhile things in life, change was scary. It required financial and other trade-offs. It totally changed how I identified myself. But the results have been beyond my wildest dreams. I have only two regrets about it today: that I didnt do it sooner, and that I didnt know anyone whod been there before me to turn to for help and advice.

Do What You Love for the Rest of Your Life fills that void. This is not a here's how you should do it book, but rather a here's how we did do it work, based on a survey of professionals who left well-established careers to begin new ones. Our collective experience is shared in the form of helpful and insightful statistics derived from a comprehensive career-change survey. Our individual stories are shared through personal testimony. These varied experiences provide a guide through the career-change process, from daydream to strategy to reality. More than that, Do What You Love shepherds you through the emotional and spiritual thickets that block any major life change. In so doing, the book draws upon our experiences with many wisdom sources. We invite you to follow those of us who have already made this wondrous, scary, exhilarating, and immensely gratifying pilgrimage.

The process we suggest synthesizes our experiences in working through various career-change issues, in more or less the order they came up for usparticularly how we worked through feelings and emotionsand the role of the spiritual in helping us through. This sequence is not absolute or inviolable, but it is logical. Since we are all different, the order that works best for you may vary a bit from the order of the book. In particular, chapter 10 Toward an Essential Spirituality can be read or referred to at any time. Part II of the book suggests a practical application of the principles learned in Part I, in such areas as rsum preparation, job hunting, and interviewing.

In order to fully realize the potential of a new career and the new life that goes with it, we found it best to begin with a journey inwardto discover who we are, what were good at, and how to develop the potential within. For many of us, this proved to be the start of a richly rewarding lifetime journey. This journey of self-realization is enhanced by following a few simple suggestions:

1. Write things out. Important issues achieve clarity on the written page, not bouncing around inside your skull. Start a notebook in which you will record your career-change process, as well as work through the several essential exercises we suggest. (I use an 8-by-11-inch school notebook with a spiral binder.) I respect that some of you would rather do anything but write that's not how you best process information. If that is your nature, I suggest you replace this book's suggestions to write with talking through the pertinent issues. Ask someone who listens well and who might give you honest and impartial feedbacka professional, if necessary. Hearing yourself talk this through is more effective than just thinking about it. The goal is to view things with impartiality and objectivity.

2. Be patient. This is one of the few major changes in your life, and it deserves to be done right. Give it as much time as it takes. Haste is as self-defeating as procrastination; time takes time.

3. Be thorough. Our experience proves that all the work suggested in this book is essential. The work we do builds cumulatively and is essential not only to the career-change process, but also to finding a deeper and more meaningful life. Shortcuts lead to dead ends. The journey, not the destination, is what is important. Trust that if you are painstaking about the journey, the destination will take care of itself.

4. Be intentional. Set aside at least 15 minutes each day to meditate, think, and write about your career-change process. Youd spend at least that much time planning a vacation or choosing a new caror worrying about how to pay for both of them.

5. Pay attention to words, and to preconceptions. Few of us realize the power of words to establish a mind-set and direct our thinkingespecially common words that we all misuse. During the course of the book, I will point out misusages that color our perceptions, particularly in the area of finances. Also, be willing to reconsider and challenge closely held and perhaps unquestioned beliefs about all areas of your life, as well as those things you deem worthwhile.

This book doesnt pretend to contain all the information that you will need to work through your career change. The appendix contains a selected list of resources for each chapter topic. Some are books that aid you by further developing the ideas and suggestions discussed in the chapter. Others are studies or Internet references; still others are names of people and organizations that can help.

I strongly emphasize the importance of patience and thoroughness as you work through Part I of the book. You are building a broad and firm foundation upon which to begin not just a new career, but also the richer, more fulfilling, and happy life that you deserve. You will get out of the process only what you put into it.

The most normal thing in the world is to feel as if youre hanging out there all alone when you go through this. Were here to tell you that youre not alonethat we are here, as an in-print support group, without which a fulfilling and successful career change is not possible. An outline for that journey occupies the first 10 chapters of this book. In the remaining pages we help you process what you have learned and begun to change about yourself into a practical guide that empowers you to leave a career that fills only your wallet for one that fills your soul.

Welcome!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To all the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who helped bring this book to life, and especially to:

The finest agents a writer could hope for: Stephanie Tade, for her encouragement, guidance, and patient hand-holding; and Ruth Kagle, for her ongoing support, good humor, and follow-through on all those details that Id rather not have dealt with.
My editor, Leona Nevler, who so wisely kept me from bumping into the trees in my own forest.
My copy editor, Laura Norstad, for improving the book in countless ways.