The Art of Work

Jeff Goins is a writer and speaker whose nonfiction book argues that every person has a calling, a term he uses interchangeably with "vocation" and "life's work," defining it as "the reason you were born" (xiv). Drawing on interviews with ordinary people, historical examples, psychological research, and his own experience, Goins identifies seven overlapping stages of discovering a calling: awareness, apprenticeship, practice, discovery, profession, mastery, and legacy. He frames these not as sequential steps but as continuous, overlapping processes that unfold throughout a lifetime.

Goins opens with the story of Garrett Rush-Miller, a five-year-old whose parents noticed him struggling during a T-ball game in June 2000. A CT scan led to emergency brain surgery in Denver, where doctors removed a golf-ball-sized medulloblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor. Garrett was left blind, mute, and paralyzed, with a 50 percent chance of surviving five years. His father Eric, a nurse, had an epiphany: Working in a field "where the clock runs out on people all the time" (xx), he realized no family member was guaranteed more time than Garrett. The family resolved to live fully. After meeting a blind tandem cyclist, Garrett was inspired to ride again, and on the one-year anniversary of his surgery, he crossed the finish line of his first triathlon with his father pushing his wheelchair. Goins uses the Millers' story to establish his central argument: A calling is not a carefully crafted plan but emerges from how one responds to life's chaos.

The first stage, awareness, requires listening to what one's life is already revealing. Goins tells the story of Jody Noland, who visited her friend Larry Elliott in the hospital after Larry was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age forty-eight. Before surgery, Larry wrote letters of love and affirmation to each of his children. He died nine months later, and the comfort those letters provided his family inspired Jody to found Leave Nothing Unsaid, a program and workbook that helps people write similar letters. Her sense of calling deepened painfully when her husband Mike, diagnosed with stage four liver cancer in 2009, refused to write letters and died within three months. Devastated, Jody nearly abandoned the work, but a year later, a dying woman used Jody's last remaining workbook to write letters to her two daughters, rekindling Jody's resolve. Goins references Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning to argue that humans seek meaning rather than mere happiness, and recounts his own moment of awareness at a conference where a speaker told the audience that most of them already knew their dreams but were afraid to admit them. The word "writer" came immediately to Goins's mind.

In the chapter on apprenticeship, Goins profiles Ginny Phang, a young Singaporean woman who became pregnant at twenty-three in a culture where unwed pregnancy carried severe social stigma. Her boyfriend demanded an abortion and her mother threatened to disown her, but the night before Ginny was to take the pills, her aunt called and told her to flush them. After keeping the baby and working as a secretary, Ginny met Amy, an Australian Chinese doula, or birth coach, in Singapore, who told Ginny she would make a good doula. Ginny trained, found the work natural, and eventually became Singapore's first full-time doula, later running the country's largest doula company. Goins argues that mentors often appear unexpectedly, forming what he calls "accidental apprenticeships," and contrasts the medieval guild system's single-master model with the modern reality of gathering guidance from multiple sources.

The chapter on practice introduces psychologist K. Anders Ericsson's concept of "deliberate practice," which requires that the activity push the practitioner to exhaustion and not be inherently enjoyable. Goins also draws on Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code and psychologist Carol Dweck's distinction between a "fixed mindset" and a "growth mindset" to argue that talent is largely the product of sustained effort. He tells the story of William Hung, whose off-key American Idol audition went viral and led to a record deal, but who later left music to become a technical crime analyst, revealing that his true passion was always math. Goins uses Hung's story to illustrate that practice should serve vocational discernment, not just skill development.

Goins argues that discovery happens through incremental steps rather than a dramatic leap. He profiles Ben and Kristy Carlson, who after a decade of leadership development work in Africa, moved to Burundi to start Long Miles Coffee Project, which improves farmers' lives through direct trade, the practice of buying directly from producers to ensure fairer prices. He retells the biblical story of Samuel, who mistook a divine voice for his mentor Eli's three times before learning to listen, arguing that a calling often comes as a gentle prompting requiring guidance to interpret. In a parallel chapter on pivot points, Goins profiles Matt McWilliams, a promising golfer whose career was cut short by tendonitis. After being fired three times from various positions, McWilliams built a successful marketing consulting business. Goins illustrates the pivot concept with examples including Andrew Mason, whose failed philanthropy platform became Groupon, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who returned from safety in America to Nazi Germany and was eventually executed, demonstrating that a pivot does not always lead to comfort but always leads to a life of consequence.

The chapter on mastery introduces the "portfolio life," a concept coined by Charles Handy in The Age of Unreason, which holds that a calling is not a single job but a combination of interconnected activities. Goins profiles Jody Maberry, a former park ranger and finance graduate who eventually launched The Park Leaders Show, a podcast combining his business background with his love of parks. Goins references psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow," the mental state where challenge and competency meet, and Dorothy Sayers's argument that the proper question about work is not "will it pay?" but "is it good?" (148).

The final chapters address legacy. Goins analyzes the film Mr. Holland's Opus, in which a music teacher discovered at retirement that his former students were his true masterpiece, and cites Stephen King's realization in On Writing that "life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around" (174). He warns against letting a calling become consuming, citing his own grandfather, a journalist and artist who died of an alcohol addiction. In the conclusion, Goins profiles Ed Cathey, a retired physical therapist who served for nearly fifteen years as a chaplain at the Nashville Rescue Mission. When asked what he was most proud of, Ed spoke not of his medical career but of the men he had helped through rehabilitation. Goins contrasts Ernest Hemingway's despair at unfinished work, which preceded his death by suicide, with J. R. R. Tolkien's short story "Leaf by Niggle," in which an artist discovered his incomplete painting finished in the afterlife. Goins concludes that a calling is never complete in a single lifetime; the choice is to either abandon the work in despair or pass it on by investing in others.