The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

A considerable amount of time spent within the so-called “domain of the task.” For Corot, for example, this meant hanging out with other painters—talking about his art, talking about trends in art, getting support for the lifestyle of the artist.

It is an intentional breaking down of the tasks of any domain into smaller and smaller components to see precisely how they work. And it results in steady and incremental improvements in performance.

It was the quality of his practice. He was engaging in what some contemporary students of optimal performance now call “deliberate practice.”

some new insight would pull the ground out from under him—and he’d feel disoriented, as if everything he thought he knew was dropping away. In these times, Lonny would doubt himself: Am I hypnotizing myself into believing a complex metaphysic that is actually baseless? he wondered.

She refused to be distracted by other causes. She would, of course, remain passionately concerned about marriage laws, equal pay, coeducation. But she knew that the vote was the key to it all. Without the vote, none of the other gains could be sustained.

She was a woman who had retained the simplicity of earlier life even as she had surpassed its limitations.” Susan B. Anthony was what she championed. She had become, through her own practice, the New True Woman.

writing a book is nothing more than a heroic act of unification. How does this work? Well, the book has a spine. A dharma. But you don’t know what its dharma is until you begin to write it. Forget about all the things you said to yourself about your book at the beginning of the project—or what you told your editor, or what you wrote in your brillia

The dharma itself will prescribe this training, and you will know it when you stumble onto it through trial and error. You’ll know it by its results, because in moments when you’re in proper training, you will feel yourself a channel for this book. You will have stepped aside somehow and let the book come through you. And this is an experience so f

Unification means simply that everything in your life must line up around the spine of your dharma. Eventually, everything that is not dharma must fall away—as