by Jenny Blake
Jot down a few notes about what entices you about each item on your Sliding Doors list, then identify any repeating themes that cut across all the roles you listed to reveal elements that are important for your vision as you move forward.
CLARIFY YOUR VISION STATEMENT
Now that you have done some expansive exploration, it is time to narrow down to a concise vision statement, a vivid call to action.
The clearer your vision, the easier it will be to decide what next steps to take and the stronger your instincts will become along the way. Remember, your vision does not need to address how to achieve anything, or if it is possible—at this point it shouldn’t—but rather what success looks like, written in the present tense.
You are going to exit your comfort zone to pivot for a reason, so now it is time to state, as best you can, what that reason is. Challenge yourself. This may not come easily, but make your best guess, then adjust and fill in the blanks as you work through subsequent Pivot stages.
Write a One-Year Vision Statement
Draw upon your values and the vision exercises you have completed so far to write a cohesive one-year vision statement, written as if it is already happening, that will guide your Pivot strategy and brainstorming.
Part one: Imagine that it is one year from today and you have achieved wild success. Describe in the present tense what you are doing, how you are feeling, and what you are proud of. Be as detailed and creative as you can. In 2012, my big, hairy, scary dream was to be a thought leader—an author and speaker—like Daniel Pink and Malcolm Gladwell. I wrote this one-year vision statement at the time:
I am contributing innovative ideas and frameworks to society by bringing disparate fields together in a unique way. I am earning a healthy living through speaking, writing, and coaching. I have more work than I can handle, which allows me to build a scalable business of workshops and courses. I feel engaged, inspired, and like I am helping people improve their lives in a meaningful way.
One of my coaching clients, Julien Pham, a physician and entrepreneur, identified his one-year vision as follows:
I am comfortable and confident in my hybrid role of being a physician and an entrepreneur. My start-up, RubiconMD, has acquired funding and is experiencing explosive growth, and I am leading a thriving team. I have a strong network of colleagues who have influence in both medicine and entrepreneurship, and a fine-tuned personal mission, something I can express with more clarity at an event like TED. I help inspire the new generation of aspiring clinician-entrepreneurs who learn from my wins and my losses, and try to contribute to making something better in society around technology and medicine, while getting feedback from others. My website, Startup Clinic, has launched, and serves as a virtual headquarters where physicians can learn about start-ups and connect with each other. I am happy, healthy, in a great relationship, and thinking of starting a family.
Part two: What parts of your vision are already present in your life, even a little bit? In what ways is this vision statement already true? Regarding what I wrote in 2012, I had already been focusing on writing, coaching, and speaking full time, with an aim to continue growing my speaking platform. I was involved in activities similar to those of the people I admired, though on a much smaller scale. I hadn’t yet landed on my next big idea, but now, four years later, you are holding it in your hands.
Julien had already been playing dual roles as physician and entrepreneur for several years. He cofounded RubiconMD, and started hosting informal dinners with other physicians, which became the beginnings of Startup Clinic. Together we clarified his core philosophy for guiding other physicians and medical institutions—to simplify and amplify—and outlined a speech he could deliver when asked to speak at conferences.
As Julien put it when reflecting on this exercise, his vision did not seem out of reach when he viewed it as an existing work in progress. “I have done versions of what is in my one-year vision successfully in the past,” he said. “Now it is just a matter of enhancing my skills in the present to build into where I want to be in the future.” By the time this book went to press, Julien was signing the term sheet for RubiconMD to receive Series A funding, just six months after he wrote his vision statement.
Clarifying your one-year vision can also be done as a mind map on an ongoing basis. Write the current year in the center with spokes for different life areas—such as career, creative projects, money, social, health, learning, hobbies, and relationships—then brainstorm a handful of desired outcomes across each area. I do one of these at the start of every year instead of more traditional New Year’s resolutions.
SUMMARIZE KNOWNS AND UNKNOWNS
During my biggest dips of self-employment, one thing remained clear: New York City was my home. No matter how expensive, how noisy, how crowded, I knew it was where I belonged. That was a core “yes,” or known variable. From there, it was up to me to get creative about how to support that decision with my business model, an unknown at the time in terms of exactly what form it should take.
When Brooke Snow reached a point of boredom and burnout with her online business, she started planning her pivot by getting clear on her knowns and unknowns. After launching five successful online photography courses over five years, Brooke realized that she wanted to teach subjects that were more personal, such as work-life balance and creativity. Her known variables and strengths were in teaching, curriculum development, and running online courses. Her unknown variables were how to set up the new business and what to do with the old one.
Brooke applied her strengths in course and community building to shift her focus into classes related to personal growth. She brought on a partner with a complementary skill set who helped rejuvenate her work, an unexpected boost. Soon after, she rebranded her website with a new tagline that was a better fit for her vision: “Living and documenting the thriving life.”
Take a moment to summarize your knowns (your must-haves) and your unknowns (elements you are still uncertain about) in your one-year vision. List knowns and unknowns across categories, such as location, finances, projects, people, results, and lifestyle.
______
In clarifying your vision, you plugged your destination into a maps app. Ping! Pin placed. But what is your mode of transport? How can you get there most efficiently? What potholes, traffic jams, and road closures should you avoid? What shortcuts are available to you and only you?
CHAPTER 3: FUEL YOUR ENGINE
What Is Working? Where Do You Excel?
I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots.
—Thomas Watson
MONICA MCCARTHY HAD BEEN AN ACTOR IN NEW YORK CITY FOR FIFTEEN YEARS when she decided she was ready for a more stable role, one that offered more creative control over her work. She started her own business doing video production and direction for entrepreneurs, but one year in she began to feel isolated. Monica realized she worked more effectively when partnering with others. As a result, she started looking for full-time jobs—her first time seeking office work since college.
Prior to kicking off her job search, Monica started hosting a monthly dinner salon called Cheshire Parlour. These events connected interesting people with each other around big ideas like freedom, time, and fortune—not the usual Saturday night networking and bar banter. This side project was a natural extension of her core strengths as a people connector and facilitator of meaningful conversations. Though Monica loved these monthly dinners, her funds available for hosting began to dwindle. It was a classic “pursue your passion” conundrum. This was her passion, but it was not providing sustainable income. She needed another outlet for her vision of working with purpose-driven people and organizations.
Monica applied for an office manager role at a company called Holstee, a lifestyle brand that creates products such as wall art, greeting cards, and office decor to help people live more mindfully. Their mission of creating produ
cts and experiences for an inspired life resonated with Monica. You might be familiar with their viral manifesto video “This Is Your Life,” which quickly racked up nearly two million views and became a bestselling wall poster.
Though she was not exactly a fit for the office manager role, during the interview she and the founders got to talking, and she told them about her experiences with Cheshire Parlour. As it turned out, they had been thinking about hiring an event coordinator to host classes and dinners, but had not yet listed the position on Holstee’s careers page.
Fast-forward a few weeks, and Monica landed a full-time consulting gig as Holstee’s events impresaria, hosting dinners, launching a Learning Lab at their Brooklyn studio, and delivering manifesto-writing workshops all around the country. She loved working with a team in a collaborative office environment, while still being able to pursue her own ideas for programs within and outside of the company. Monica said of her time working with Holstee, “I learned so much more in one year there than I would have in a decade working by myself.”
Monica’s story illustrates how planting in what you are already good at prepares you for what’s next. When she was not getting traction from acting, Monica drew on her knowledge of how to be effective in front of the camera to provide video production and creative direction for entrepreneurs. She then planted in her academic background in philosophy by connecting people and hosting the Cheshire Parlour dinners, building her own creative outlet even without knowing what it would eventually become. Because she was clear on her values and one-year vision, she was able to translate her community-building strengths into a custom role at Holstee—an example of putting her unique career portfolio to work.
Your career portfolio is the aggregate of your strengths, prior work experience, and existing connections. Just as investment portfolios can be diversified by asset class, such as stocks and bonds, your career portfolio includes a blend of assets that are already working in your favor. The exercises in this chapter will help you understand what your biggest inner resources are, and how you can apply them to accelerate the next stages of the Pivot process.
IDENTIFY YOUR STRENGTHS
First up: identify your strengths to determine which ones energize you most in your present-day work, and which ones you could direct even more attention toward. The most engaging work allows you to apply your best skills, interests, and unique “Zone of Genius.”
Childhood Interests
Start homing in on your innate talents by looking at what activities you enjoyed as a kid; your career strengths have probably been expressing themselves in some way long before adulthood.
Joanna Bourke loved to cook growing up and had been interested in food her whole life, though she decided to pursue business studies when she went to university. That choice led her to many work opportunities and invaluable professional experience, but her passion for food remained. After eight years in a finance operations role in the United States, Joanna left to enroll in a three-month cookery school program back in her hometown of Dublin, Ireland, based on her vision of starting an events company someday. “My love of food never went away, but now I can apply my project management, analytical, and operations experience to pursuing a career in the food world,” she said.
A few months after completing cookery school, Joanna launched her own company, The Chopping Board, which integrated her business experience with her childhood vocational aspirations.
During Jason Shen’s move from content marketing to product management within the start-up he worked for, he stumbled across a piece of paper from childhood: his kindergarten teacher’s end-of-year evaluation. She had written, “He especially enjoys computer work, games, and making things.” Seeing this reminded Jason that the change he was seeking at work was not out of reach—it was a logical extension of activities he had always loved. “That reminded me that my desire to build stuff and use computers was clear from a young age,” he said. “Wanting to be a product manager wasn’t just something I had been brainwashed into by Silicon Valley or other external sources.”
When I was ten years old I started a family newspaper, the Monthly Dig-Up, featuring technology tutorials, interviews, and family updates that I sent out faithfully every month for the next eight years. I also loved playing “business” and “school” with my younger brother, teaching him things I was learning and creating worksheets for him to fill out. Today I earn a living from activities that center around writing, technology, and teaching.
Study Your Past for Patterns
Think about activities you most enjoyed growing up. Perhaps you will remember this entirely on your own, but this is also an opportunity to inquire among your family and childhood friends about your interests. Ask them: “What did I enjoy doing as a kid? What was most important to me? Any quirks about my personality that stood out to you, or that made me different from my sibling(s) or classmates?”
Given that the activities you enjoyed at six years old were probably different than at sixteen, even if they are related, list your favorite recreational and creative interests across the four age brackets below for a more fine-grained examination.
Zone of Genius
Earlier we talked about the four Career Operating Modes, two of which are sweet spots for impacters: proactive and innovative. What separates the two? Innovative impacters are fully applying their unique talents to make a powerful contribution to the communities they care about. So how do you discover what your sweet spots are to ensure that you are doing the same?
Ask yourself: What am I insanely good at? When do I feel most “in the zone”? What natural talents have I refined into strengths over time? In The Big Leap, author Gay Hendricks says our work activities fall into one of four buckets: a zone of incompetence, competence, excellence, or genius. He describes each one as follows:
The Zone of Incompetence: This is made up of all the activities you are not good at. Others can do them a lot better than you can.
The Zone of Competence: You are competent at these activities, but others can do them just as well.
The Zone of Excellence: These are activities you do extremely well, and from which you can make a good living. Hendricks says this zone can be a “seductive and even dangerous trap” as it often prevents us from fully “taking the leap into [our] Zone of Genius.”
The Zone of Genius: These are the activities you are uniquely suited to, that draw upon your special gifts and strengths. As Hendricks says, “Liberating and expressing your natural genius is your ultimate path to success and life satisfaction. . . . [It] beckons you with increasingly strong calls as you go through your life.”
How do you know when you are working in your Zone of Genius? How do you find it in the first place? Laura Garnett is a peak performance strategist who focuses on two key factors to discover someone’s Zone of Genius: innate talents and purpose.
Talent, as Laura defines it, is the unique way you solve problems. By identifying the types of challenges you are attracted to and how you tackle them, you can steer toward these areas for greater fulfillment and impact with your work.
Purpose, the second ingredient, relates to the motivation behind what you do. What is the impact you want the work you are doing to have, and for whom? Purpose is your personal mission statement. It goes deeper than your one-year vision, connecting all the work you do to an underlying theme. Some people’s purpose is to raise a family; for others it is to create delightful experiences by hosting events. Many impacters find purpose in helping others in some way. To explore your purpose, Garnett suggests thinking about a core challenge you have faced in your life. What struggle have you overcome, either for a short period of time or as a recurring theme throughout your life? How might you be able to share what you have learned to help others in this area?
Zone of Genius Observation
Observe the work you are currently doing: What is working best in terms of your day-to-day activi
ties, job roles, daily routines, and social interactions? When are you working in your Zone of Excellence versus your Zone of Genius? What activities from your past were in your Zone of Genius that may be latent now?
Be an observer this week, noting when your work falls into a Zone of Competence, Excellence, or Genius. There may also be activities that have potential for your Zone of Genius that you are not objectively great at yet, but that serve as clues to what you can invest more time and energy into if they line up with your vision.
Another way to understand and describe your core strengths and interests is to take personality assessments such as Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, and the Enneagram. You might also include more esoteric profiles such as astrology and numerology, which can illuminate innate talents and preferences. If you have taken any assessments in the past, now is a great time to revisit your results. Copy and paste all your reports into an Evernote notebook or Google Doc titled “Personality Assessments” for easy reference.
WORK-HISTORY HIGHLIGHTS
If your strengths and childhood interests are your inner fuel, then your past experiences—how you have applied those strengths and the resulting accomplishments—are your external accelerators.