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I’m a sucker for “find your purpose” books. Roll your eyes all you want, I can take it. I’ve always been obsessively ambitious (I seem to get a runner’s high off of being in over my head), so anything that promises to help me chart my next step has my attention.
The only thing is, for the past year, I’ve really struggled to define what that next step is, even in the broadest strokes. In fact, for nearly as long Sseko Designs founder Liz Forkin Bohannon’s book, Beginner’s Pluck, has sat on my shelf. I felt listless at work; normally, I’ve always been the type to have a five and 10-year plan in the works. But since my daughter was born, my career took more than a backseat. My drive seemed to dry up. I just felt burned out. Uninspired. Ready to check out. As much as friends assured me that it’s normal for my priorities to shift to my family life, it felt like more than that: I just didn’t know what I was passionate about anymore. It was like in all my running around to adjust to life as a mom, I’d disconnected from what I wanted and could only identify what I should want or should do or should say.
But Forkin Bohannon’s school bus-yellow book kept catching my eye, and eventually, I committed to spending part of my morning commute reading it. Even if it promised to help me “build a life of purpose and impact” that I couldn’t currently define. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have an end goal, though; Forkin Bohannon’s writing was so chatty and conversational that I felt like I was hanging out with a friend. The book didn’t demand that I show up with answers or a 10-step action plan. Instead, it told Forkin Bohannon’s story of founding Sseko Designs, a socially conscious fashion line, sharing her hard-won wisdom from every challenge in the brand’s nearly 11-year history. Chapter 1 is a tough-love reminder that you’re probably pretty average—and why that realization can be freeing. From there, she goes further against the grain, explaining why you need to stop trying to “find your passion.”
Please excuse me while I audibly gulp and slouch in my seat to avoid being seen. That chapter was everything I needed to read in that moment. Forkin Bohannon calls BS on all of the people who claim they’ve been passionate about something their whole lives (“Like always? Since you were a teen or a kid or in utero or…?”), and how, for her, it all started with a small interest that grew over time. And that finding said passion and devoting all of her energy to launching a company doesn’t mean your life will be happy and easy, something many of us have grown to associate with finding your purpose. The author should know; when she first started Sseko, she and her husband lived out of their car for a while as they toured the country, trying to sell the sandals she’d designed with the help of a few women in Uganda.
Each chapter is equal parts vulnerable, enlightening and funny (and often, self-deprecating), and the more I read, the more I naturally found myself relating to the excitement she had over launching a business, and what’s gotten me psyched about my career. I stopped stewing over problems and started dreaming up ideas for the future.
By the end of Beginner’s Pluck, a line about one of her employees struck me: “She had spent years and years trying so hard to play the part she thought she was supposed to play, and she got lost somewhere along the way.”
How many of us have felt like that at some point? It summed up how I’d been feeling, and while I may not find my purpose selling sandals, as that employee did, I felt a renewed sense of purpose as I finished the book. I can have a rich work life and family life; maybe the former isn’t as full-tilt as it has been in the past right now, but it can be just as fulfilling and rewarding. I just have to know what I’m working toward. And it was only through stepping back, making a little leisure time in my day (that wasn’t mindlessly scrolling Instagram or binging a show, but actively engaged my brain) and noting any time I got even a glimmer of excitement about something, no matter how mundane, that I started to find my way back.
Beginner’s Pluck is available in hardcover and paperback, on Amazon and at most bookstores nationwide.
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