Other Interests: pursuing your passion

One year on: you've got to find what you love

It's been more than a year since I started this blog and just under a year since I finished as a partner at my old firm.  So, how has my new venture gone?

It's still evolving: it's too easy to get distracted by work and not spend enough time on thinking about the future.

I am enjoying the journey and the time I have with my wife and family.

And I am reading the experiences of a lot of other people who are on their own journey.

In You've got to find what you love,  Steve Jobs' Commencement graduation address to Stanford University, Jobs observes:

Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle...

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

UPDATE : Here's the speech on video

More reading

How do you define success? (Curt Rosengren)

It Ain't Hard (Evelyn Rodriguez)

Are you busy? (John Clark)

For the record

I retired as a partner of Gilshenan & Luton on 30 June. I have agreed to remain as a part-time consultant for a while.

In the meantime I am working on my new incarnation as Jacobson Consulting.

Making decisions

As my decision-making process about my future continues, I decided I needed some space/time out to consider where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

I couldn't have chosen a better facilitator than Sam Beasley who introduced me to Dr Sven Hansen of the Resilience Institute.

Sven conclusively showed me that there are biological, emotional and spiritual aspects to effective decision making.

More on this another time. But as Sven mentioned that ritual and religion could be factors in resilience I've sent him a link to Laibl Wolf who looks at self-mastery through Kabbalah.

Finding Satisfaction

Worth reading is a series of columns at FindLaw entitled Find Satisfaction in the Law : Taking Control over Your Career and Your Life.

Whilst it seems to be focussed on younger lawyers, the columns provide a variety of case studies.

Moving Day

Well, I'm still at G&L and have moved to the new office.

Good environment: efficient workspaces and great views.

Embedded in the new design are some work practices reforms.

More on my future soon.

Career Change

The Occupational Adventure has some interesting recent links including this one.

As I work my way through my plans I'm becoming more aware of the emotional aspects of change.

Options

This Fast Company story is about a former lawyer who found her true calling as a harbor pilot, steering 1,000-foot tanker ships through Portland's waterways. Not quite me.

I'm currently reading Million Dollar Consulting.

Work portfolios

Charles Handy 's book The Age of Unreason discusses the idea of work portfolios which include paid work, homework, gift work and study work.

"...the full portfolio of work only begins to expand after the (paid) job ends. The most difficult transition ...is in fact from a one-item portfolio to a multi-item one, not to an empty one. The transition is always a very personal bit of discontinuous change.." (at page 148).

When is it time to change?

In a person's mind it is hard to pinpoint a time when a decision is made. It is more like a combination of events pointing you to a conclusion.

I found Julie Steiner's article in BOSS magazine on when is it time to try new experiences, helpful.

Resume writing

One of the hardest parts of job hunting is putting together a resume. Having gone straight to my current legal firm from university, I have never prepared a job application.

Whilst I have a legal CV it does not describe all my non-legal experience. One thing I know is that I hate putting together applications for accreditation as I have to prove that I've done this or that. Once I get accreditation I feel relieved but that's all I get for my effort (plus some extra self-esteem).

So I found sites like Mind Tools and Resumesatwork helpful. I also got good feedback from Davidson Recruitment.