From Making a Living to Creating a Life

How to have work be as good for your soul as it is for the mortgage payments. This book is for those of us how have had enough of the status quo and want to empower ourselves to live life - and work - fully. David Firth's book has an ambitious subtitle: 'How to be Happy and Successful by Utterly Transforming Your Work.' In it he advocates for a major shift in what we have been taught. He shows how to become more aware of the dominant story about work in our society and be willing to choose our own narrative. The deeply engrained and mostly unchallenged story about work is that it is the thing you have to do to pay the bills - and that the most important first thing you need to do in life is 'get a good job' or 'make a good living' before you can attend later to the nice to haves - like creating a satisfying life. That wouldn't be so bad a foundation were it not that so many people have difficult, stressful and unrewarding experiences of their life in work.In this book, David Firth offers us a fundamental challenge by showing how the craft of 'making a living' is profoundly intertwined with the art of 'creating a life.' We simply need to accept that we are at the source, the cause of it all.This is a courageous act - because the old disempowering story of work is so strong in the world - and David shows how to make it happen.From 'Making a Living' to 'Creating a Life' explores personal transformation in dealing constructively with difficult bosses, making sense of office politics, working well with challenging colleagues, eliminating overwhelm and busy-ness, discovering freedom when surrounded by constraints and ultimately finding meaning and purpose in work.Written in compact chapters that are designed to be thought-provoking, funny and helpful, David Firth shows how to rise above our cultural conditioning and create a life driven by true passion, purpose - and great work!FROM THE AUTHORHello everyone! Look, I'm going to blow my own trumpet here: I love this book! I believe it shows people how they can truly enjoy and derive deep satisfaction from their work, whatever it is they happen to do for a living.But the book goes further than that: it challenges head-on the default conversation that work is, at best, the thing that earns the money to pay for what we'd rather be doing, or, at worst, that it's a curse for not having been born rich.What if we had a new vision for work, not as a necessary evil, but as a source of all the great things we want our lives to be; an expression of who we are; a way of serving rather than getting; a legacy we want to leave to the world? That's the book's promise.I love this book also because I think it exposes a major lie. It's a well-intentioned, noble lie, but it's simply untrue nonetheless. Best leadership education continues to tell us that The Boss is the source of inspiration, motivation, reassurance about the future and so on. And that's why we continue to complain about our bosses so much: they simply cannot live up to our ideals. We place way too much expectation on those above us to fulfill the things - eg inspiration, motivation, reassurance about the future - that deep down we know can only come from inside us.So with this book, I want to challenge people to be at work in a more empowered, confident, 'inside-out' way than they might be currently. I think that puts readers back in control - and establishes them as the cause of things rather than the effect or circumstances.