first debilitating surgery.^5 For the father-and-son duo that
had endured so much, the race was a way of declaring to the
world and perhaps to themselves that they would not let one
little tumor stop them from continuing with their lives, from
celebrating life itself. Thanks to the clinical treatments his
parents had enrolled him in, Garrett’s survival rate had now
increased to 90 percent.
That was fourteen years ago.
Since that first surgery that nearly crippled him so many
years ago, Garrett has competed with his father in more than
a dozen triathlons, as well as one on his own. His eyesight,
though not fully restored, has returned to the point that he
can see blurry objects and shapes. He is still considered
legally blind but can do things the doctors said were
impossible. He is, without exaggeration, a walking miracle.
This is not a book about miracles. It is a book about finding
your calling, about how you discover what you were born to
do. A calling is that thing that you can’t not do, an answer to
the age-old question, “What should I do with my life?”
There are books that talk about how to find your dream
job or what it takes to become an expert—this just isn’t one
of them. The Art of Work is a book about vocation, a word
that has come to mean something very different from the
original definition. The word vocation comes from the Latin
root vocare, which means “to call.” It was originally used in