In Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck
, Jon Acuff shows you how you have the power to give yourself a fresh start.
Chasing (or revealing) dreams
Chasing a dream always requires learning new skills. I didn’t get to be a public speaker by not speaking publicly. I had to learn that skill. I didn’t know how to travel very well. I’d never done even really simple things like renting a car by myself. If you try to tell me that driving over those spikes at the rental car return at the airport is not horrific, you are a liar. There about one thousand new skills I get to learn as I chase my dream.
The flipside is true, too. Learning a new skill can reveal a new dream. How can you know you love doing something if you don’t try it? The popular approach to figuring out a calling is akin to sitting in a cabin in the woods and waiting for the calling to show up. That’s ridiculous. Passion is often found in the crucible of work. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty before you can know what your passion is.
The ‘God of Food’
Alex Atala would tell you that, if you ate at his São Paulo restaurant D.O.M., which is number 7 on the S. Pellegrino list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
Time magazine put him on the cover and labeled him the ‘God of Food.’ Surely someone with such a deep, rich Career Savings Account knew all along he was meant to be a chef? Nope. ‘Atala found his calling while scrounging for money as he backpacked from nightclub to nightclub in cities from Berlin to Milan.’ He never had designs to be one of the world’s greatest chefs. ‘He started working in kitchens because it was a job a Brazilian in Europe could get. He discovered he was pretty good with a knife.’
Learning new skills
Learning something new always leads somewhere new. It has to, that’s the very nature of new. You don’t learn something new and end up somewhere old.
- For starters, you look like amateur. This is not a threat, this is a promise. Whenever you learn something new, you look like an amateur because you are.
- The other problem with learning a new skill is that it takes forever. How long is forever exactly? Longer than you thought.
Remember
- Your career will become extinct unless you learn new skills.
- If you want to learn a new skill, give yourself permission to be a tourist, not an instant expert.
- New skills make you ‘stuck proof.’ It’s hard to get stuck in an old situation when you put a priority on investing in new skills.
Complement Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck with Talent versus Skill