Passion Struck with John R. Miles
George Appling on How to Make Intentional Career Choices | EP 545
Thu, 12 Dec 2024
In this insightful episode, John sits down with George Appling, author of Don't Settle and a self-proclaimed "passionpreneur," to explore how to make intentional career choices that align with your passions and goals. George shares his unique approach to career pathfinding, offering actionable steps to help you identify your ideal life and the work that supports it.Drawing on his expansive experiences across government, nonprofits, arts, and entrepreneurship, George discusses how to balance income with passion, avoid settling for the default path, and embrace deliberate choices. He introduces five proven approaches to align your career with your personal vision and explains how to actively shape the relationship between your work and what lights you up.Link to the full show notes: https://passionstruck.com/george-appling-make-intentional-career-choices/Call to Action: Through relatable stories, practical exercises, and opportunities for reflection, George provides listeners with the tools they need to own their career decisions and create a fulfilling, purpose-driven life. Whether you're starting a new career, navigating a midlife change, or simply seeking clarity, this episode will inspire you to take control of your journey and act with intention.Sponsors: Rosetta Stone: Unlock 25 languages for life at “ROSETTASTONE.com/passionstruck.” Prolon: Reset your health with 15% off at “ProlonLife.com/passionstruck.” Mint Mobile: Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at “MINT MOBILE dot com slash PASSION.” Hims: Start your journey to regrowing hair with Hims. Visit hims.com/PASSIONSTRUCK for your free online visit. Quince: Discover luxury at affordable prices with Quince. Enjoy free shipping and 365-day returns at quince.com/PASSION. In this episode, you will learn: How to identify their ideal life and career path by reflecting on what they truly want, enjoy, and find meaningful. Five actionable approaches to aligning their career with their passions and goals. The importance of intentionality in making career decisions and avoiding default paths. Strategies to balance income and passion, whether through integrating them into daily work or funding passions outside of work. How to overcome fear and indecision when choosing a new career path or making a significant life change. Practical exercises and tools for self-reflection and mapping out deliberate next steps in their journey. Lessons from George Appling's diverse career experiences, spanning government, arts, nonprofits, and entrepreneurship. How to create a fulfilling life by taking ownership of career choices and acting with purpose. Insights into the mindset shifts necessary to avoid settling and embrace bold, intentional actions. Ways to design a career and life that reflect their unique values and priorities. Connect with George Appling: https://www.georgeappling.com/For more information on advertisers and promo codes, visit Passion Struck Deals.Join the Passion Struck Community! Sign up for the Live Intentionally newsletter, where I share exclusive content, actionable advice, and insights to help you ignite your purpose and live your most intentional life. Get access to practical exercises, inspiring stories, and tools designed to help you grow. Learn more and sign up here.Speaking Engagements & Workshops Are you looking to inspire your team, organization, or audience to take intentional action in their lives and careers? I’m available for keynote speaking, workshops, and leadership training on topics such as intentional living, resilience, leadership, and personal growth. Let’s work together to create transformational change. Learn more at johnrmiles.com/speaking.Episode Starter Packs With over 500 episodes, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. We’ve curated Episode Starter Packs based on key themes like leadership, mental health, and personal growth, making it easier for you to dive into the topics you care about. Check them out at passionstruck.com/starterpacks.Catch More of Passion Struck: My solo episode on The Science of Healthy Habits My episode with Gabby Bernstein on finding profound freedom and inner peace Can’t miss my episode with Arthur Brooks on the 4 Ways to Build the Life You Want Watch my episode with Kate Bowler on Why There is No Cure for Being Human If you liked the show, please leave us a review—it only takes a moment and helps us reach more people! Don’t forget to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally.How to Connect with John:Connect with John on Twitter at @John_RMiles and on Instagram at @John_R_Miles. Subscribe to our main YouTube Channel here and to our YouTube Clips Channel here. For more insights and resources, visit John’s website.Want to explore where you stand on the path to becoming Passion Struck? Take our 20-question quiz on Passionstruck.com and find out today!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Coming up next on PassionStruck.
People typically have a lot more agency than they think they do, right? You can make decisions every day that make your life better. And I was in my talk with, if you take 1.0, 1.0, think of that as a step, and you raise that to the 365th power, that equals one. But if you take 1.01, so imagine that is 1% better, and you raise that to the 365th power, that's 37, right? This is night and day.
I always tell people, when in doubt, act. Make a decision today that will make your life better. And if that's going from zero push-ups to one, that's a step. If that's going from walking 2,000 steps to 3,000 steps, take it, right? Take the step every day to make your life a little bit better and own that choice. You have the power to do that. Don't make excuses. Take the damn step.
Welcome to passion struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hey, passion struck fam. Welcome to episode 545 of the passion struck podcast.
I'm your host, John Miles, and I want to start by sending a huge thank you to each of you who show up week after week committed to your growth purpose and living a life filled with intention. You are the heart of this community, and it's your dedication that makes the PassionStruck movement so impactful. If you're new here, welcome.
You have just joined a community that's all about transformation, purpose, and tapping into your fullest potential. We're thrilled to have you on this journey with us. And for those who want to dive even deeper or introduce this to a friend or a family member, remember to check out our episode starter packs. With over 540 episodes, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin.
So we've curated playlists for you on Spotify or at passionstruck.com slash starter packs. I also want to give a quick shout out to this week's earlier episode with Jessica Zweig, an award-winning entrepreneur, personal branding expert, and the bestselling author of The Light Work.
Jessica shared profound insights on harnessing your inner light, embracing your authentic self, and using spirituality as a tool for personal growth. If you're on a journey of self-discovery and want to learn how to step into your infinite potential, be sure to check out that episode. It's packed with inspiration and practical advice.
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Chapter 2: How can you make intentional career choices?
That really resonates because two of my three kids are twins and they're 14 years old. And the girl twin is the one who wants all of her grades to be 99s or 100s. And the boy twin spikes on empathy. Like he just feels what other people are feeling and he cares and he's kind. And so they're quite different and they're twins and they've done every single thing together their whole lives.
So I'm sure it's biological somehow.
I am sure. Well, given this education that you had, one of the things I always like to ask is, was there a teacher or a professor along the way that you remember who changed your life for the better?
If you'll indulge me, I think there are two. When I was in high school in a very small town in Texas called El Campo, a tiny little town, like one McDonald's, one Dairy Queen kind of town, the German professor, whose name was Paul Sechting, I actually saw him last week. He encouraged me to study abroad. And so I went to Germany for the first time on a study abroad program when I was 16 years old.
And that started a lifelong love of travel. And I've been all over the place and lived all over the place. And so I do credit him with kicking it off. The other one is a little bit of a longer story. When I was at Texas A&M, there was a a gentleman there named J. Wayne Stark. And he was the director emeritus of the Memorial Student Center, which is a big establishment, the MSC.
And when I was there, he was already retired. And he was considered the wise man on the mountain. And he had his director emeritus office back in the corner, which nobody knew. But it turns out if you made a 4.0 for a couple of years, he would send someone out in the middle of the day to tap you on the shoulder.
And this sounds different now because of Marvel movies, but they would tap you on the shoulder and say, Mr. Stark wants to speak with you. And then the clouds parted and the angels sang and something special was about to happen. And he gave me the following advice. He said, you're doing a degree in accounting and that's useful.
And he's a big fan of doing a degree that's useful, science, engineering, business. He said, but look, you're at an educational institution where there are world-class faculty in a lot of different disciplines. And you would really be remiss to not study under them. because you don't want to miss this chance to become a well-rounded person.
And so he gives me this piece of paper and he says, I want you to take these classes. And it was Shakespeare, the philosophy of art, metaphysics, medieval history. I mean, all sorts of random stuff. And it was Mr. Stark. So I'm like, okay. And so I did that. And I just started taking all the classes that I had to.
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Chapter 3: What are the key strategies for aligning your career with your passions?
It's just such a shame because method one and so many of the methodologies that I learned there that they still use today at Accenture were just so far and away above what some of the other firms had.
That resonates. My college roommate of three years went to work for Arthur Anderson. And he really waxes nostalgic about how wonderful the place was. And then they just had that one screw up called Enron that took down this revered institution. It is, it's a very sad story.
I was, you don't know this about me, but I was there at the epicenter. So I was in the Houston office. Ironically, I had never worked on Enron because They actually needed people to work on other energy clients other than Enron so we could be a little bit more diverse.
But I remember I was senior manager at the time and an FBI agent, one of our internal cybersecurity people show up at my door and they said, we need your computer. You'll get it back in about 48 hours. I said, I've never worked on Enron. I have no data about Enron. Well, needless to say, I never saw that computer again.
And about three weeks later, I had charted a new course because things came crashing down very quickly.
Well, I did a consulting project at Interon. It wasn't in the stuff that went south, but it was there in the business and it was quite something.
Well, that business was quite something at its time.
It was.
Well, you and I then took a similar path in different ways, but we both went into industry. You spent time at Siemens and Brightstar and other places, eventually becoming a CEO. When did you start feeling the need to move away from this traditional corporate path, and what factors for you influenced that feeling?
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Chapter 4: How do you balance income and passion in your career?
Well, let's take someone who might be earlier in their journey. Let's say someone's in their mid-20s and maybe they've come out with a business degree and they're working kind of in a lower level position, working their way up, but they have this big passion on the side. Maybe they want to be a writer. Maybe they love music, whatever it may be. What are some things that they can do?
And I know we're going to get more into this. right now in their career where they could be setting the seeds to do what they really love while doing this thing that maybe is giving them a paycheck, but they're not completely thrilled about.
That's the exact topic of my book. The whole book is about how to deal with that kind of thing. I can step back and describe my framework where I can talk about that individual person. Which way do you want me to go?
Let's talk about that individual person, and then I'll go into the book after that.
Yeah, so you're 25 years old, you have a business degree, you're in a job that's okay, but you're not passionate about it, and you want to be a writer. I think one of the very important things this person needs to answer is, what is their need for financial security? And you can really think that through.
And in the book, there's a little tool that helps you think through that because it's things like, do you need to live in an expensive city or are you okay in a less expensive city? How many kids do you want to have? Do you expect to pay for their college? Do you have expensive taste? Do you need a new car in a few years? Do you expect to have health problems?
Right, so getting a handle on your need for financial security. And then at the same time, really testing your readiness to follow your heart. If the person wants to be a writer, they really have to test their readiness to be a writer. And I tell people when I talk about my book, especially young people, don't trust yourself when you're testing your readiness.
Ask other people because people are not very good about assessing their own capabilities. Ask people that you trust to assess your capabilities. Ask people to assess your capabilities in a way that's anonymous, right? That would be great.
And so I would say to that person, look, if you're ready from a capability point of view and your need for financial security is low, you should probably start writing commercially, go for it, follow your heart. But if your need for financial security is medium or high, I would keep working at that regular business job.
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Chapter 5: What practical steps can you take to follow your passion?
But a right-of-way for us is we ran one of the most sophisticated supply chain systems in the world. So you could make a lot of money by moving other people's products or using that to teach other companies on how to do it better. I mean, they're right-of-ways like that. But for you, because you have this land, you want to use it more times of the year.
If you can use this property to make a product, you're using it to make more money and you leaned in on, you could buy other people's needs, but then you're losing out on the margin potential and you can control how much you make and the quality of it and produce a superior product where you're making more money off of it. So lots of key things for people to learn from that, because whether it's
a festival or whether it's your own personal business, it's these right of ways that we often don't think about that become easy stepping stones that people can take. Exactly. You said it better than I did. Perfect.
That's what I did.
John described it.
That's what I did.
So I want to get back to your book, Don't Settle. And in it, you introduce, which is really at the heart of it, this matrix that helps people identify their unique career paths, or as you call them, meta paths. And in here, you describe them as independent, money, passion, experiment, and balance. Can you explain what each one of those are and how these meta paths work? Sure.
So the five meta paths. The meta path defines a relationship between your work and your passion. So we've got five different paths that govern that relationship. The passion path is make your passion and your work the same thing now. The independent path is the opposite. It's that your passion and your work don't have anything to do with each other.
The experiment path is mostly for people who don't know what their passion is. And so the experiment path is try things. And you can try things in different organizations, different geographies, different parts of one company. And I've got some rules in the book around how to experiment in a way that makes your resume look good. But you're trying things out to look for that spark, right?
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Chapter 6: How do personal experiences shape career decisions?
it gets to be a major drag and that's where i had gotten and i had been building up this capital for years and years because i wanted to launch at that point it was different than what i'm doing today but something akin to this and i knew i needed the capital to get it going But then an unexpected life event hit me.
I had been married for 22 years and all of a sudden wound up in a situation where I was getting divorced, not because I wanted to, but because life happened. And all of a sudden, this war chest I had built up is now significantly depleted. And so now you're faced with this situation that you really want to start this passion project. But you're back to you need to earn more money.
And what do you do? What would you give someone who I'm using my example, but other people are in a similar situation?
I would say, one, get real clear on how much money you need to give the passion project to go. And two, I very strongly believe that you can start building out a passion business while working in the real world at the same time. That's what I did. And so I would keep working. I would dabble in the passion business, write the business plan, take the steps that you can take.
get to the number you need to give it a go and then even if you can direct your real world career in a way that enables you to learn capabilities that are going to help you on the passion project it's a standard balance path it's just it's slower because you lost half your money
so let me give you another scenario which i think could be common in for many of the college students out there and i'll relate this to me i had grandparents who really felt like their grandkids should be doctors and they had this in mind of the life that that they thought that we could have. And I think in some cultures, there's even more and more pressure on this.
So the kid is basically told you're going to be a doctor or you're going to do this profession. And they know in the back of their mind, it's not something that they love, but they're being forced into. And down the line, they're hoping for an outlet that they can go into. And I think, unfortunately, this happens more than it's more common than I probably even think it is.
How could they go into this knowing that they're in this state and facing this pressure? And how do they pick a meta path when that's thrust on them?
I think it's a great scenario. It's a terrible scenario, but it's a great question. First, I would say to the parents, you're making a terrible mistake in pressuring your kids or grandkids into a career. That's awful. You really shouldn't do that. And it's not only these being a doctor. We've got a lot in small family businesses where the parents expect the children to work in the business.
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Chapter 7: What does it mean to be an intentional entrepreneur?
What an inspiring conversation with George Appling. His insights on choosing a career path with intention, understanding your unique relationship with work and finding joy in your professional life are invaluable. One of the biggest takeaways from today's episode is that fulfillment and success come from making deliberate choices.
Whether that means aligning your work with your passion or designing a career that supports what you love outside of work, Georgia's MetaPaths framework is such a powerful tool for anyone at a crossroads, and it reminds us that we don't have to settle for a default path. We can create a life and career that truly resonate with who we are.
As we wrap up, think about the areas in your own life where you may be on autopilot or simply going through the motions. How can you start making intentional choices that bring you closer to the life that you envision? Remember, the power lies in choosing your path rather than letting it choose you. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Please take a moment to leave us a five-star rating and review and share how you're applying these insights. And if you know someone who could benefit from George's message, please share this episode with them. Your support helps us grow this community and empowers others on their journey to intentional living.
For links to everything we discussed today, including George's new book, Don't Settle, and the tools he shared, check out the show notes at passionstruck.com. You can also support the show by visiting our sponsors at passionstruck.com. where you'll find discount codes and special offers from our partners.
And remember, each of these resources helps fuel the show and bring you inspiring content every week. Beyond the podcast, I'm passionate about bringing these insights and strategies to organizations, conferences, and teams through speaking engagements.
If today's episode sparks something in you and you think these messages could inspire your organization, I'd love to explore how we can work together. Whether it's a keynote, workshop, or team session, my goal is to help teams tap into their potential and start making intentional, impactful choices. You can learn more at johnrmiles.com slash speaking.
And if you haven't already, subscribe to our Live Intentionally newsletter for exclusive content, insights, and our weekly courage challenge, which helps you put these lessons into action. Before we go... Here's a preview of what's coming up next on PassionStruck. Joining us is Madison Mars, as she reflects on her transformative year as Miss America.
Madison shares the highest challenges and lessons learned during her reign and how she's using her platform to leave a lasting legacy. We'll dive into her mission to inspire others, her passion to put an end to pancreatic cancer, how she hopes to foster connection and make a meaningful impact.
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