Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life

by Laura Gassner Otting

Overview

Limitless helps innovators, idealists, and iconoclasts get “unstuck” — and achieve extraordinary results. This book is like a high energy masterclass and brainstorming session all in one – with actionable tips to transform your vision for your career and doing work with purpose.

What if success doesn’t equal happiness? Many of us spend our lives pursuing a singular idea of success, one that was created for us by someone else. We give votes to those who shouldn’t even have voices and strive to go faster and faster even as we find ourselves falling further and further behind. We chase gold stars, we check all the boxes, we Lean In – and we still feel incomplete.

This is not a story about failure, but it might as well be. When we don’t define success in our own terms, finding our purpose and carving our own path becomes impossible. How do you break the cycle so that you can be better at work and life?

In Limitless, Laura Gassner Otting teaches you how to ignore the rules that created your limits, align your energies and your actions, and do work that really matters so that you can live your best life. Often described as “a kick in the ass surrounded by a warm hug,” Laura brings both tough love and wisdom and offers a no-holds-barred look at what it really takes to get out of your own way and earn your success today.

If you ever dreamed about discovering and crushing that personal goal that is so big and so scary that you’ve only dared whisper it to yourself, this book is the permission you didn’t even know you needed to live into it as only you can.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940858760
Publisher:	Ideapress Publishing
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Series:	Limitless Series
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	617,446
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Laura Gassner Otting helps innovators, idealists, and iconoclasts get “unstuck” — and achieve extraordinary results. Through Limitless Possibility, Laura collaborates with entrepreneurs and investors to push past the doubt and indecision that consign great ideas to limbo. She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and catalytic perspective informed by decades of navigating change across the start-up, nonprofit, political, and philanthropic landscapes. Laura’s 25-year resume is defined by her entrepreneurial edge. She served as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, helping shape AmeriCorps; left a leadership role at respected nonprofit search firm, Isaacson, Miller, to expand the startup ExecSearches.com; and founded and ran the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, which partnered with the full gamut of mission driven nonprofit executives, from start-up dreamers to scaling social entrepreneurs to global philanthropists. In addition to Limitless, she is also the author of Mission-Driven, a book for those moving from profit to purpose. Through her own commitment to give back, Laura has helped build a local Montessori school, co-founded a women’s philanthropic initiative, advised a start-up national women’s PAC, grew a citizen-leadership development program, and completed three charity-inspired marathons—projects emblematic of her passions and values. She’s turned on by the audacity of The Big Idea and that larger-than-life goal you just can’t seem to shake. She’s an instigator, a motivator, and a provocateur, and she’s never met a revolution she didn’t like. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 The Consonance Crisis 9

Chapter 1 Why We're Stuck 11

Chapter 2 The Value of Questioning Limits 31

Chapter 3 Measuring What Matters 51

Part 2 The Four Elements of Consonance 65

Chapter 4 Calling 67

Chapter 5 Connection 87

Chapter 6 Contribution 103

Chapter 7 Control 119

Part 3 Finding Your Consonance 135

Chapter 8 Changing Your Career 137

Chapter 9 Changing Your Workplace 157

Chapter 10 Changing Yourself 175

Conclusion 187

Acknowledgments 197

Bonus Content 201

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Laura Gassner Otting relieves us of the madness-making, autopilot drive toward other people’s empty definitions of success, and reveals how to get on the path to becoming limitless though consonance, matching ‘what’ we do with ‘who’ we are. Read it, learn it, live it!” - Jonathan Fields, Author of How to Live a Good Life and Founder of Good Life Project®

“I’m grateful for Laura Gassner’s Otting’s new book -- “Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path and Live Your Own Life” – because it encourages us to look deep within to find our purpose and focus on what really matters. After 20 years of studying, recruiting, and stewarding leaders through massive career change, she uses her expertise to show how we can match what we do with who we are and want to be. I do believe with all my heart that when you can identify something you do well, that you enjoy doing and that supports the values that are important to you, you define success in your own terms. “Limitless” will help you discover that sense of alignment, relevance and belonging in your own heart.” - Nido R. Qubein, President, High Point University

"There may not be anyone who knows as much about work with meaning and impact than Laura Gassner Otting. Reading Limitless is like having an extended career counseling session with a straight-talking friend who knows you better than you know yourself. This brilliant little book shatters countless myths about what it means build a career -- and a lifestyle -- that's both good for you and good for the world. If you're grappling with malaise, frustration, exhaustion or full-on burnout, Limitless provides an action-oriented blueprint to get unstuck." - Marci Alboher, VP Encore.org and author of The Encore Career Handbook: How to Make a Living and a Difference in the Second Half of Life.

"For those who long to live a powerful, authentic life, Laura Gassner Otting provides a call to action. Limitless is an inspiring read that's both logical and poetic."- Dorie Clark, adjunct professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and author, Entrepreneurial You and Reinventing You