by Pamela Slim
In April 2013, Amanda Wang showed her documentary about living with BPD, The Fight Within Us, at a mental health film festival in Washington, DC. “When people were watching my film, they were laughing, cheering, and screaming. It was a really wonderful experience to have them come up to me and say, ‘Thank you for doing this because you’ve put a voice to what I’ve always experienced but never had the ability to share myself.’ Hearing those words was very life affirming. They reminded me that what I’m doing on my mission is genuine and helpful to people.”
Because Amanda defined her roots and remembered them at a point of great difficulty, she was able to create a deeply meaningful piece of her body of work and share it with those she cares about serving the most.
When I was in the middle of writing this book, I had a conversation with my kids, eight-year-old Josh and five-year-old Angela Rose (Rosie), on the way to school.
Josh: You should write your book at the office, Mom, not at home.
Me: I actually do write at the office too, but I also have to work with my clients to keep my business going. This will not last forever; I will be done with the writing in six weeks. Oh yeah, and then I will do two trips, to Portland and San Francisco.
Josh: Why do you have to go there?
Me: Because I need to spend time with my clients in person sometimes. Some moms choose to just spend their time with their kids, and that is their work. That is a great choice. Some moms, like me, want to spend time with their kids, and work outside the home. I want to leave something useful and important in the world with my work, which is why I am writing the book.
Rosie: I wish you were like the other kind of mom.
Me: I know that it really sucks sometimes. I know you have to sacrifice so much for this to happen. I hope that as you get older you might see things a little differently and think that it was worth it for me to spend time working.
Rosie: By the time you finish your book, we will be all grown up and we won’t want to play with you anymore.
Me: I hope not!
As you can imagine, I felt like a deadbeat mom when I heard my kids say this. And at the same time, it was a chance to get very clear about my own roots.
What do I value?
I value love. And I value contribution, especially being able to be of assistance and counsel to others.
What do I believe?
I believe that it is vitally important to do things with my life that impact others in a positive way.
I believe that when people make great career choices that align their strengths and gifts with a deeper purpose, we all win. When we love what we do, we are more open and compassionate and better able to solve our biggest problems and challenges.
I believe that we are all equal, and each person on earth has something valuable to contribute, when given a good opportunity.
I believe that being a good parent is both spending time with my kids and perfecting my craft so that they see me engaged in work I love.
I believe that my kids are a huge priority in my life.
Why do I believe it?
I believe in making an impact on others because I have seen many of my clients’ lives changed by the work we have done together. I have seen the joy on the face of a client who leaves a soul-sucking job and starts a successful business. I have beamed with pride, seeing clients grow their business or get great jobs or make inspiring films.
I believe people become more open and compassionate when they align their career goals with their strengths, because I have seen it happen hundreds of times. No longer gripped by negativity and creative angst, happily employed people become more interested in the world around them, are more willing to help others, and participate in activities that contribute to the greater good.
I believe that we are all equal and have something valuable to contribute, because I have worked with people from diverse economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds my entire life. I have learned valuable things from all of them.
I believe that being a good parent is both spending time with my kids and perfecting my craft, because I watched my dad be totally engaged and passionate about his work, and it had a massive influence on my own career choices.
I believe my kids are a huge priority in my life, because I watched my mom spend quality time and care shaping her children into responsible, kind, caring, and independent adults.
Whom do I care deeply about serving?
I care deeply about serving leaders in business who have huge potential and who may lack access to bigger stages and opportunities. I want to see them realize their potential and take their place in positions of leadership.
Why do I care about serving them?
I see the tremendous creativity and great results in work environments with diverse perspectives and experiences. I see the connection and joy that comes from watching people see leaders from all backgrounds.
What drives me to act?
I act when I see that I am at risk of not living according to my values. When my kids told me that they were tired of my spending all of my family time writing my book, I realized that I had better hurry up and finish.
Reflecting on my own roots reminds me that I must carefully choose the projects for my body of work that directly correlate to the problems I want to solve and affect those I want to help. I must constantly evaluate my priorities and choose only the projects that will have the biggest impact. If I don’t, I am choosing to spend time away from my children for frivolous reasons.
Exercise: Identify Your Roots
Now it’s your turn. Get to a place free of distraction. Take a deep breath, and answer these questions from the perspective of what you know to be true, not what you think you should say. There is no right answer, and your answers may change at different points in your career.
What do you value?
Brainstorm a list of values. Review the list, choose your top five values, and create a definition for each.
What do you believe?
List the top five things you know for sure about your life, yourself, your career, etc.
Why do you believe them?
Describe the key life experiences that have shaped your values and beliefs.
Whom do you care deeply about serving?
Who are the people who you want to impact?
Why are they important to you?
What will happen in their lives as a result of your support?
Which problems do you want to solve?
What do you want to fix?
What could be made better in the world with your help?
What drives you to act?
Which thoughts, feelings, circumstances, or beliefs drive you to act?
When you get distracted, frustrated, stalled, or stuck while creating your body of work, revisit this section to remind yourself why it is important to keep going. Never forget your roots.
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 t
he 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:
A writer
An encyclopedia of hip-hop lyrics
Obsessed with bow ties
A public speaker
A brand ambassador
Emotionally intelligent
A student of lean startup principles
African American
A sports marketing expert
A certified life coach
The son of a mechanic and a housewife/babysitter/seamstress
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.”