What should I do with my life?
A few months ago as I was starting on my quest for a more fulfilling life, I sat down and typed the words "what should I do with my life" into Google. As if it intuitively understood, Google actually provided an answer - the first hit was an article in Fast Company magazine entitled "What Should I Do With My Life" by Po Bronson. The article was adapted from Mr. Bronson's book, What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. And he had a website of course.
As he was trying to find his own way, Mr. Bronson interviewed 900 people, and whittled that down to 70 people that he spent a great deal of time with:
These are ordinary people. People of all ages, classes, and professions -- from a catfish farmer in Mississippi to a toxic-waste inspector in the oil fields of Texas, from a police officer in East Los Angeles to a long-haul trucker in Pennsylvania, from a financier in Hong Kong to a minister at a church on the Oregon coast. These people don't have any resources or character traits that give them an edge in pursuing their dream. Some have succeeded; many have not. Only two have what accountants call "financial independence." Only two are so smart that they would succeed at anything they chose (though having more choices makes answering The Question that much harder). Only one, to me, is saintly. They're just people who faced up to it, armed with only their weaknesses, equipped with only their fears.
I've always figured that I, like everyone else, was here for some purpose. There was something we excelled at and that should just jump out at us if we looked. But Mr. Bronson found out that wasn't necessarily true:
Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper -- a faint urge. That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer. Of course, there's never a single right answer. At some point, it feels right enough that you choose, and the energy formerly spent casting about is now devoted to making your choice fruitful.
And he identified four key stumbling blocks that get in the way of us acting on that calling:
- MONEY Doesn't Fund Dreams
The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom. Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the "practical approach." But in truth, the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It's scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.
- SMARTS Can't Answer The Question
The point is, being smarter doesn't make answering The Question easier. Using the brain to solve this problem usually only leads to answers that make the brain happy and jobs that provide what I call "brain candy." Intense mental stimulation. But it's just that: candy . A synthetic substitute for other types of gratification that can be ultimately more rewarding and enduring. As the cop in East L.A. said of his years in management at Rockwell, "It was like cheap wood that burns too fast."
- PLACE Defines You
The relevant question in looking at a job is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because once you're rooted in a particular system -- whether it's medicine, New York City, Microsoft, or a startup -- it's often agonizingly difficult to unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards. Your money is good anywhere, but respect and status are only a local currency. They get heavily discounted when taken elsewhere. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.
- ATTITUDE Is the Biggest Obstacle
Environment matters, but in the end, when it comes to tackling the question, What should I do with my life? it really is all in your head. The first psychological stumbling block that keeps people from finding themselves is that they feel guilty for simply taking the quest seriously. They think that it's a self-indulgent privilege of the educated upper class. Working-class people manage to be happy without trying to "find themselves," or so the myth goes.
It all comes down to how comfortable you are with The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question: "What do you do?":
In other words, if you don't like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it's partly because you don't like your answer.
I've never really enjoyed the question, and I've never enjoyed answering it either, because I was never really able to say what I did without having to describe my job. I've always thought that I should be able to say what I did very simply. something like "I make stuff work when other people say it's impossible". It's not my job; it's what I do.
But before I can really say what I do, I need to figure out what I'm really good at. I need to determine my strengths.
And that is my next step.
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