In his best-selling book, The Passion Plan, Richard Chang showed individuals how to discover their passion and turn it into personal and professional fulfillment. Now, in The Passion Plan at Work he shows how to bring passion into the workplace--and turn good companies into great ones. Adapting his seven-step model for individuals to an organizational perspective, Chang explains how passion can provide direction and improve performance at all levels of a company. Carefully leading readers through his do-it-yourself process, Chang provides specific guidelines for creating an action plan that galvanizes an organization around passion. Along the way he provides practical tools--questionnaires, worksheets, and checklists--to help assess an organization's Passion Profile and make passion a big part of your company's ongoing success.
If you are feeling like you have been settling for a mere job or paycheck - STOP! Regardless of where you are in your career, this book offers you a proven five-step process for discovering what you are meant to do... and then shows you how to do it! Read this book and you will find your own answers to: - Why are you working so hard? - Discovering your passion - Assessing your proficiencies - Setting your priorities - Making your plan - Proving your plan
Probing the ominous side of career advice to "follow your passion," this data-driven study explains how the passion principle fails us and perpetuates inequality by class, gender, and race; and it suggests how we can reconfigure our relationships to paid work. "Follow your passion" is a popular mantra for career decision-making in the United States. Passion-seeking seems like a promising path for avoiding the potential drudgery of a life of paid work, but this "passion principle"—seductive as it is—does not universally translate. The Trouble with Passion reveals the significant downside of the passion principle: the concept helps culturally legitimize and reproduce an exploited, overworked white-collar labor force and broadly serves to reinforce class, race, and gender segregation and inequality. Grounding her investigation in the paradoxical tensions between capitalism's demand for ideal workers and our cultural expectations for self-expression, sociologist Erin A. Cech draws on interviews that follow students from college into the workforce, surveys of US workers, and experimental data to explain why the passion principle is such an attractive, if deceptive, career decision-making mantra, particularly for the college educated. Passion-seeking presumes middle-class safety nets and springboards and penalizes first-generation and working-class young adults who seek passion without them. The ripple effects of this mantra undermine the promise of college as a tool for social and economic mobility. The passion principle also feeds into a culture of overwork, encouraging white-collar workers to tolerate precarious employment and gladly sacrifice time, money, and leisure for work they are passionate about. And potential employers covet, but won't compensate, passion among job applicants. This book asks, What does it take to center passion in career decisions? Who gets ahead and who gets left behind by passion-seeking? The Trouble with Passion calls for citizens, educators, college administrators, and industry leaders to reconsider how we think about good jobs and, by extension, good lives.
Work isn't supposed to be a four-letter word! Does the work you do matter to you? Are you unsure what you want to do for a living? Are you in the right place but looking to advance? No matter where you are in your career, you were born to do work you love. National bestselling author and career expert Ken Coleman was stuck in an unfulfilling career until he realized he didn’t have to be. In his latest book, he draws on what he learned from his own ten-year journey as well as from coaching thousands of others to walk you through the seven stages to discovering and doing meaningful work. Relevant to any job or industry, you’ll learn step-by-step how to: Get Clear on the work you were uniquely made to do and why. Get Qualified to do the work you were created for. Get Connected with the right people who can open the doors to your dream. Get Started by overcoming the emotions and mistakes that often hold people back. Get Promoted by developing winning habits and traits. Get Your Dream Job by doing work you love and accomplishing results that matter to you. Give Yourself Away by expanding the dream to leave a legacy. This is your moment. You are needed, and you were made to contribute. It’s time to exit the daily grind and use your talents to start living your dream once and for all.
In an unorthodox approach, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving their careers. Not only are pre-existing passions rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work, but a focus on passion over skill can be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Cal reveals that matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not matter. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love, and will change the way you think about careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.
This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of passion for work by addressing the origin of the concept and its theoretical issues: how can passion for work be developed, what are the consequences to be expected at the individual and organizational levels, and how can passion for work shed new light on contemporary issues in the workplace.
The coauthors of the bestselling Peak Performance dive into the fascinating science behind passion, showing how it can lead to a rich and meaningful life while also illuminating the ways in which it is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to cultivate a passion that will take you to great heights—while minimizing the risk of an equally great fall. Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness once again team up, this time to demystify passion, showing readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers. They ultimately argue that passion and balance--that other virtue touted by our culture--are incompatible, and that to find your passion, you must lose balance. And that's not always a bad thing. They show readers how to develop the right kind of passion, the kind that lets you achieve great things without ruining your life. Swift, compact, and powerful, this thought-provoking book combines captivating stories of extraordinarily passionate individuals with the latest science on the biological and psychological factors that give rise to—and every bit as important, sustain—passion.
Accessible to anyone of any faith or background, The Passion Test takes readers on a journey to experience the transformation that occurs when they determine what really matters most to them. Through interactive sections, the book helps the reader to identify their top 5 passions, and provides guidance on how to align their life with those passions. Combining powerful storytelling and profound wisdom from the world's leading experts in self-development, The Passion Testshows practical ways how the law of attraction can be used to bring a life of unlimited reward and unconditional love.
The brilliant creator of NPR's Planet Money podcast and award-winning New Yorker staff writer explains our current economy: laying out its internal logic and revealing the transformative hope it offers for millions of people to thrive as they never have before. Contrary to what you may have heard, the middle class is not dying and robots are not stealing our jobs. In fact, writes Adam Davidson—one of our leading public voices on economic issues—the twenty-first-century economic paradigm offers new ways of making money, fresh paths toward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to combine the things they love with their careers. Drawing on the stories of average people doing exactly this—an accountant overturning his industry, a sweatshop owner's daughter fighting for better working conditions, an Amish craftsman meeting the technological needs of Amish farmers—as well as the latest academic research, Davidson shows us how the twentieth-century economy of scale has given way in this century to an economy of passion. He makes clear, too, that though the adjustment has brought measures of dislocation, confusion, and even panic, these are most often the result of a lack of understanding. The Passion Economy delineates the ground rules of the new economy, and armed with these, we begin to see how we can succeed in it according to its own terms—intimacy, insight, attention, automation, and, of course, passion. An indispensable road map and a refreshingly optimistic take on our economic future.
We all know people who jump out of bed every morning, eager to start the day, so fulfilled by their personal and professional lives that they wouldn't change a thing. What's their secret? Passion. We all have it, but we don't all use it to its full potential. In The Passion Plan, Dr. Richard Chang presents seven simple steps to discovering the things we really care about, deciding where we want them to take us, and developing a plan to get us there. Through clear explanations, insightful self-assessments, and inspiring stories of people both ordinary and famous, Chang shows how the power of passion can reshape our lives.
