In Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together, Pamela Slim fondly recalls her father and his efforts to establish a community center in Port Costa (CA), “an institution of learning…filled with people learning Spanish, or painting, or tap dancing.” She realized that he was determined to create “a deep and rich body of work that not only had great meaning and significance to him [a very successful professional photographer] but also created considerable change and value in his community.”
This is what Dan Pink has in mind in DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us when suggesting, “The secret to high performance and satisfaction — at work, at school, and at home — is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.” As Slim explains, “Your body of work is every thing you create, contribute, affect, and impact. For individuals, it is the personal legacy you leave at the end of your life, including all the tangible and intangible things you have created…For organizations, it is the products, property inventions, ideas, and value they share throughout the course of their existence. Organizations that structure their internal strategies around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will be more competitive and resilient.”
How to develop a “mastering mindset”
Slim suggests eight separate but interdependent initiatives that can help to create a meaningful body of work.
1. Define your root: Which higher purpose are you determined to serve? What drives your efforts to do so?
2. Name your ingredients: Whatever resources you need to fulfill that mission, including other people.
3. Choose your work mode: In which position can you succeed? Professionally? Personally? Both?
4. Create and innovate: What can you make better now, soon, and eventually?
5. Surf the fear: Identify, understand, and manage pressures, fears, and anxieties.
6. Form your team: Recruit allies (collaborators, mentors, and patrons) to help achieve your goals.
7. Define what success means to you: Identify those goals that, once achieved, will create the greatest sense of pride and appreciation.
8. Sell your story: Tie all this to create a telling story that will inspire others to become allies in collaboration.
On pages 13-15, Pamela Slim provides a self-assessment exercise that asks her readers to imagine themselves in the future, on the last day of their lives, looking back at what they created, developed, nurtured, and contributed. “What, ideally, would you like to see?”
What will your body of work be?