Who doesn’t love books? If you’re anything like me, entering a bookshop can be fatal to the bank card. I never walk out spending less than $100 at any given time, a bit like walking into Chemist Warehouse, but that’s an entirely different blog for another time 🙂
The books we choose to read invariably satisfy a learning or knowledge craving. However, I also like to think of the books we choose as an insight into our passions and what gets us excited. It is a doorway into who we are. The reason I say this, is because, it wasn’t until I stared at my bookshelf in early January 2018 that I realised what I really wanted in life in terms of my professional endeavours.
It all came about one afternoon, when I decided to clean up my spare bedroom to embark on creating a new creative space for me to read, design and sew garments in for myself. In transferring the books in the spare room from their dusty packing boxes to my new Ikea bookshelf, I was filled with a sense of accomplishment with my efforts at organising my life just that little bit more. At that point, I took a moment to pause. I stood back and looked at my newly stocked bookshelf and something quite profound happened, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.
During the early days of January 2018, I had been on a journey to really nut out what I wanted do with myself, work wise, and to get a firmer hold on what my legacy will be – deep questions to say the least. As any overachiever would do, I set myself on a pathway to self-coaching, if you could call it that. I worked out during this intensive process that I put myself through that I wanted to only do things in my life and career that resulted in having an impact on other people and the world – lofty, yes, but not unattainable.
Circle back to the bookshelf and the profound moment. As I was standing back and feeling the organised sense of accomplishment, I read the titles of the books and considered their genres. It was at this very moment, that the light bulb or, as I prefer to call it, the profound moment occurred. I realised that for over the last two decades the only books I had been travelling around from home to home covered two genres. Are you ready? Fashion and style – number one, and personal and professional growth – number two. It was like a sledgehammer just hit me. How could I not have known these were the only two true genres of books that I loved. More importantly, these were the two things that I loved.
Back to the journey of what I was doing with my life and career, what was my legacy going to be. Now that I knew I wanted to have an impact and I also, now knew that I only loved those two genres of books, I went into overdrive to work out – how can I turn that into a career? What do I need to do with this new information.
Well that was the profound moment. I realised I needed to start a business that encompassed my two passion genres. Here I am today, almost one year into starting my own business, that focuses on building core life skills in young professionals so that they can achieve their career aspirations, and I can now tell you go look at your bookshelf.
So the questions I ask you today are, what’s on your bookshelf? And how can you turn those knowledge passions into your new career direction?
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