Choices are a pain. Often they leave you with regrets, as you ponder about the grand possibilities you missed. And if choosing your lunch from a long menu makes your heart throb, you can imagine agony and chaos you will encounter while choosing a career — or deciding what you were born to do. Many a time it is just easier to give up and pin the hope on providence to reveal it to us.

But Chris Guillebeau wants to help you here. The best-selling author of The $100 Startup has come up with a new book on methods to zero-in on your life’s mission. Born for This: How to Find the Work You were Meant to Do shows helps people connect the dots so that they win their ‘career lottery’ — your dream job.

The good news is that such a career is not just reserved for the pros — the Warren Buffets of the world who knew for sure they were born to invest. Even common folks on whom talent does not shine brightly can find their life mission, says Guillebeau.

Nor does it require confronting a mid-life crisis — a highly successful investment banker who finds his calling as a singer, for instance. It is actually a lot less dramatic and the book studies career changes that typically go unreported but are a reality all the same. Not just that, the new role may also turn out to be financially more rewarding than the earlier one.

Is it possible to earn more, have flexible work schedule and a lot of independence and be joyful? Going by the examples in the book, the answer seems to be a resounding ‘yes’. Take the case of Leon Adato, who gave himself the job title of ‘head geek’. Adato dabbled in many things in his early years and took up software training and worked his way to systems support. Like most IT folks, he moved around but finally managed to find a role of doing what he loved to do, without quitting and joining a travelling drama troupe, but working within an organisation.

Business deal Career growth is fine, but the real deal comes when you launch a business. Sample the story of Daniel, an immigrant who worked as a property management supervisor. When Daniel wanted to give a pizza treat to his crew for their hard work over the hectic holiday season, his boss answered in the negative. Angry, Daniel quit his job; and he had no plan at hand. But he slowly worked his way up in business, managing one property at a time and continued to build success after success.

Granted, but what about the many others who quit on a whim and turned to failures? For many, it is best not to leap without a safety net. There are, however, umpteen legitimate (and some possibly not so) ways to earn a living, doing what you love to do, feels Guillebeau. Thanks to technology lowering the bar on starting a business and earning a few bucks (a side hustle, as Guillebeau calls it), there are many low-risk ways to earn. They may not make you gloriously successful; rather than feel chained, the way to freedom is to break out of the mental prison that limit your thinking.

The real-life case studies Guillebeau uses to drive his points are a charm. There is no utopian theory, a dream or a pie in the sky. It is eminently practical and is a how-to guide on various common themes — teaching, publishing, selling handcrafted products, consulting — common launch pads to start on one’s own.

If you think self-help books promote a lot of glorified myths, smile. Guillebeau debunks common ones, including the oft-quoted one on passion and money. “Be guided by your heart, money will follow” — that’s nice for a royalty earning author to say! The book objectively argues that you must not just go for joy or be stuck with money, but find a joy-money-flow. That is, your work must bring joy and a way to earn money. Importantly, there must be a flow of one to other.

Reality check Still, many of Guillebeau’s suggestions will make many eyebrows rise in unison. Take the case of Jason who auctioned his last name to the highest bidder and became Jason HeadsetsDotCom for one year and Jason SurfrApp the next! Angelina, an Asian American, quit her pre-med course (in UCLA no less) to pursue a major in arts. She went on to design a unique time-management planner, which became a great success. That said, can one really conclude she would not have been happy doing anything else?

Truth is, often we may not know what we want and having a bit of financial safety net to pursue something else may not be a bad thing. Is joy something that can only come from one thing, or that one is born to pursue only one mission? Probably not — especially given our Indian ethos of being joyful in the here-and-now. Searching frantically, switching jobs or making large scale changes do not seem as palatable as it may for audience in a different culture.

You also wonder if the ‘joy’ they found could have had less to do with what they do, let alone the grand idea that they were born for it. May be they found peace through a good work-life balance. Many stories are about folks who were getting burnt out in pursuing something, scaled back and found a way to earn enough while having time for other things. So, the key is balance – of money and joy; of long hours and switching off.

The book would have been merely entertaining if it just told us the fascinating stories of common folks and their experiments in trying to find their calling. But what makes it valuable is how it tries to analyse the stories and find common threads to give you a glimpse of the secret sauce (and in some cases the ingredients to avoid).

There are blueprints of methods, how to go about them, steps and timelines to try different things and alternatives. But it takes will power and the ability to go against the tide. The bottomline? No pain, no pizza.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Chris Guillebeau is a “modern-day explorer”. He visited 193 countries before he turned 35. His first book, The Art of Non-Conformity, was translated into more than 20 languages. His second work, The $100 Startup, sold over 300,000 copies. His latest book, The Happiness of Pursuit, was published in September 2014.

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