The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do

sites for clients—skills he learned long before he ever
starting building websites. Never would he have guessed all
those years of painting were actually training him for
something that wasn’t art, at least not in the traditional
sense.
So how did a young man who dreamed of becoming an
artist turn into a web developer? How did someone who
didn’t grow up playing computer games start a business
building websites? And how did he learn all those skills so
quickly? The easy answer is to say he was called. But as we
have seen, a calling is never so simple. The more complex
answer, the honest one, is that before he knew what he was
doing, Martyn was practicing.
The lesson of the Accidental Apprenticeship is that long
before a person is ready for his calling, life is preparing that
person for the future through chance encounters and
serendipitous experiences. That’s what Martyn’s brother
William was doing. He was mentoring his little brother,
without even knowing it, in a skill that would eventually be
instrumental in his success. Neither brother probably knew
the significance of what was happening, but the two were
engaged in a long-distance apprenticeship in which the elder
was influencing the younger, helping him find his way.
But Martyn didn’t stop with watching his brother. He
absorbed all the content available to him, reading everything
he could find on the subject—blogs, articles, books,
anything. His goal wasn’t just to be good; he wanted to be
great. When working on a website, especially at the