Book Nook: Limitless - How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life

I recently had a chance to review Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life. Obviously one can take the "ignore everybody" too far, but it's usually a bigger problem that we are tempted to put too much weight in what other people say, and end up changing who we are and who we should be as a result.

This book provides a way to get "unstuck" and achieve extraordinary results. It provides a framework for everyone, at every age and life stage—from high school seniors and entrepreneurs to new mothers going back to work and retirees—to understand what success means for them and what to change to have it the way that works for themselves. Through personal anecdotes and stories from nonprofit, corporate, and government leaders – all of whom were in the midst of massive career change – she has interviewed over the past 20 years, Gassner Otting helps others become limitless.

I had a chance to interview her to learn more.

Why did you start Limitless Possibility?

I started Limitless Possibility because I had sold my executive search firm to the team who helped me build it, and I suddenly had a crisis of identity.  

“Who am I if I’m not the person handing over the business card with the big title on it?”  

“What do I stand for if I don’t have a company whose brand and mission I reflect in my daily work?”  

“What is my professional purpose if I suddenly don’t have a profession?”

“Does the ‘what I do’ match ‘who I am’?”

“Is there a way to be both successful AND happy?”

I was at sea, lost, and unmoored. I was fascinated by the idea that for twenty years I’d interviewed, studied, recruited, and stewarded thousands of leaders in the corporate, nonprofit, and public sectors, most of which were success but not all of which were happy, and I wondered why.  So, I bucketed up all the things that I’ve loved to do, and that I thought the marketplace might buy, and they wrapped themselves around a theme of empowerment and engagement to help people get unstuck and accomplish amazing things. Out of that was born a speaking career (after my TEDx got some attention) and a book (after several of my blogs went viral and people asked for more).

Why is "follow your passion" not really good advice?

Part of the reason we get it so wrong is that we have been given this terrible advice to follow our passion. That advice—the spoken-word illegitimate sister of the Live! Love! Laugh! tattoo—sounds all well and good, and maybe it even looks pretty in a scrolly font. It tantalizes with fleeting euphoria ... before it packs a wailing uppercut of disappointment.

As anyone who has ever followed their passion will tell you, your passion will rough you up. It will disappoint you. It will play hard to get. It will gut you—and maybe your bank account, too. Doing something about which you are passionate is the holy grail, and by all means, let’s get there. But the promise of bliss, however Instagrammable, is ephemeral and insufficient. While following your passion might get you on the road, it doesn’t provide a road map.

Rather than following your passion, you need to invest in your passion—by devoting your time, treasure, and talent to leaning into the goals that you set for your particular life plan. Investing in your passion requires an understanding of what gives you consonance. Before you can invest in your passion, you must discover your own mix of calling, connection, contribution, and control—and learn how each of these elements matters to you individually.

What's wrong with phrases like "fake it 'til you make it" and "I'll be happy when…"?

Fake it ’til ya make it posits that if we pretend to be something, we will eventually become it. Well, I think that’s a bunch of hooey. Ever notice that this so-called wisdom tends to be proffered by those whose best advice is Just hustle harder? “Faking it” is not the right path to self-discovery, for two reasons.

First, how do you even know what you want to fake when you don’t have any idea of what would be consonant to who you are, to how you define calling? Without a clear direction—a steadfast little lighthouse beckoning and guiding you—modeling your actions to suit that purpose will be next to impossible. This is especially true if you are still taking your cues from whatever professional path your algebra teacher once thought might be suitable for you or the other moms in your circle think you are the perfect path for you.

Second, while you are so busy faking it, you won’t get a chance to let down your guard and allow yourself to practice—and to fail. Without the opportunity afforded by failure, you have no chance to reset, recalibrate, and restart. If you’re pretending you’re already on the right path, how will you expand your skills or explore your options?  We encourage our kids to take chances all the time, to live on the edge of their incompetence and learn new things. We never tell them to fake it, we tell them to try. We should give ourselves the same encouragement.

If we don't want to just follow our passion, how can we make sure we're still finding purpose - and paying the bills?

Before we can pursue success and feel fulfill by success, we need to start by ignoring everyone else and their ideas of what success should look like.  The bottom line is this: you can’t be insatiably hungry for someone else’s goals. That way lies comparison, unhappiness, and guilt. So, let’s stop running everyone else’s race, and mark and run our own.  

We all need four things in order to feel like we have purpose, and that our work matters, and that we are defining success for ourselves.  And those four things roll up into one very important feeling. First, we need a calling, something that is bigger than ourselves whether it is curing cancer or buying a beach house, it has to speak to our souls.  Second, we need to feel that our daily work has some connection to serving that calling, so that we know why we, in this box, in this division, in this organizational chart matter.  Third, we have to see how our work is making a contribution to the lifestyle we want to live, the career trajectory we want to build, and the values we want to manifest.  Finally, we need to have some amount of control over the connection and contribution that our work gives to our calling.  When we have these things, we are in consonance.

We have to all four elements, at least a little, but at every age and every life stage, the amounts of each that you want and need will differ.  For example, as a young idealist working on a political campaign, I was deep into the calling of this candidate whom I revered, but I had no connection because I was 21 years old and fetching coffee all day.  The work contributed nothing to my bank account but everything to my future career prospects. Yet, I had precious little control. And, that was perfect for me then. Now, in mid-life, with aging parents and young kids, I couldn’t possible work in a job that gave me no connection or control, because the sacrifice of time is where my pain points lie more sharply. In order to be in consonance now, I need different levels of each of the elements of calling, connection, contribution, and control than did my younger self.

When we are in consonance, the “what we do” matches the “who we are.”  It gives us alignment and flow, and allows us to be the fullest versions of our holistic selves both at work and at home.  It allows us to find our fundamental state of leadership, so that we can achieve great things on behalf of the people we love and the causes we hold dear.  And, in that, we find both passion and purpose.