Areas of expertise

Christa McAuliffe didn’t let being a teacher hold her back from becoming an astronaut. Who knows where her career might have taken her? (NASA photo)

Perhaps the important thing I learned in The Bootstrapper’s Workshop was to disconnect my identity and my calling from my work.

These circles overlap in the ol’ Venn diagram, but not completely.

There were many other helpful concepts that Seth Godin shared in the videos and prompts, but this was the overarching conclusion I was able to make that changed my life — and a key message I feel compelled to share with others.

As I understand it, the way I make a living should be aligned with my values, but it doesn’t have to be an expression of who I am as a person or encompass everything I stand for. I can create something small that helps other people, and if it is successful I can grow it into something bigger or use the proceeds and lessons learned as leverage to create the next thing.

My favorite business idea at the moment is the Ice Cream Float — an ice cream shop that literally sits on a float out in the harbor and can be accessed via dinghy (deliveries to shore would also be available).

I have no plans to launch this venture anytime soon (feel free to steal the idea if you want), but to me, it’s the perfect example of a business that has nothing to do with my supposed areas of expertise. My degree is in music education, after all.

Of course, we don’t need to define our areas of expertise so narrowly. We can recognize that, whatever we do or study, we are developing or have developed transferable skills that can be applicable in a variety of contexts.

And if we want to do something that requires skills we don’t have, we can learn them.

We can’t do everything. But we can do virtually anything, if we’re willing to devote the resources to it. That need not be overwhelming, though. Another thing I learned in The Bootstrapper’s Workshop is that we can focus in areas where we have a head start — especially with communities of people with whom we have already built trust.

I used to have a rigid interpretation of this. As a music teacher, I believed that I could serve aspiring musicians and fellow music teachers, and that’s it. It didn’t feel like my life’s calling, though, so I was uneasy with it.

Now I understand that a) I didn’t have to be limited to serving these two groups; and b) serving them didn’t have to be my life’s calling in order for me to do it. But I got stuck, afraid to invest my effort, get it wrong, waste my time. It’s too bad — I could have learned a lot and helped people.

Ironically, The Bootstrapper’s Workshop has been dropped from Akimbo’s roster of workshops for the fall, and they’ll be discontinuing workshops completely in 2023. Seth himself moved on from Akimbo a couple of years ago to work on other projects, including The Carbon Almanac. Priorities change and shift, and that doesn’t invalidate what came before. Things that began can end, and we’re still glad they existed.

Your songs, writings, and paintings are not your children. Your business is not your baby. Even a baby is not an extension of her parents — she’s a separate, living being who will be an adult someday, and her parents will have to let go. We can create all kinds of things that can exist independently of us and go on to have their own lives. Recognizing that in the beginning — or before the thing is even created — is an antidote to the painstaking, exhausting curation of a precious, seamless brand that will somehow express the sum total of who we are and what we do.

Your areas of expertise are probably broader than you think they are, especially if you’re a couple of decades into your career. You don’t owe it to yourself to continue on the path you began, and you don’t owe it to the rest of us to give what we expect of you. You can change. You can grow and expand. It’s most efficient to grow into places that are adjacent to where you are, but you can make leaps, too. And some of the leaps you choose to make may surprise even you.

What do you feel called to do that has nothing to do with how you currently make a living? Has your identity ever held you back from trying something new? And what areas of expertise do you have that you may have undervalued — or that you may be undervaluing now? I’m interested to hear.