“Follow your dream”, “do what you love”, “find your calling” — we have heard these loud phrases many times. They promise us a fabulous life full of happiness and inspiration. There is only one puzzle to solve — to find yourself. Blogger Kali Holk does not share this approach and warns: if you play around in search of yourself, you can miss real life.
If you can’t figure out what to do in life, the advice to “do what you love” will only annoy. It’s banal and useless. If you had an irresistible craving for a particular cause, you would not be sitting here with your hands folded and waiting for inspiration. I advise you to stop looking for a job that you love with all your heart.
First, it’s hard to find something if you don’t really know what you’re looking for. Secondly, love implies the dominance of emotions over reason. If you are trying to figure out why you came into this world, you should not discard rational thoughts and indulge in all serious. You need to know yourself very well in order to find your “reason” for living in this world.
Believe me, most of us have to do real research. You can not sit still and wait for a happy occasion. You have to get up and move forward, learn and explore, try and make mistakes.
Don’t worry about finding what you love. The main thing is to act. Life is not a chain of insights. It is not always possible to accurately determine the moment when everything falls into place, the stars converge or an event triggers thoughts that open up deep understanding.
Sometimes it takes time to get to know your real self and understand what you need.
Most often, understanding and insight come gradually. But if you just sit and wait for something important to happen, nothing will come of it. You risk sitting still until it’s too late.
If you put a frog in a pot of water and gradually increase the temperature, it will boil alive. The frog does not notice the danger as long as the water is heated. We, too, can be in her role. The pot is our daily life. You sit quietly, doing nothing, and approach an unpleasant discovery.
Fleeting ideas, desires, moments of inspiration are signs that urge you to do something. But you do not notice them because you are looking for something meaningful. You want to be the Archimedes who jumped out of the tub and yelled «Eureka!» But that won’t happen.
If you live by the made-up rules, then one day you will wake up and ask yourself: “How did I get here?” Of course, you are not a frog that the villain threw into a pot to boil. But the world around us changes us. Gradually, the vicissitudes of life make you forget about who you are and why you are here. But once you knew all this. Once you lived on the wave of creativity and did not know fear.
It seems to you: if it were a real vocation, it would thunder like a bolt from the blue. But this is not true
Creativity expert Ken Robinson in a TED talk «Do Schools Suppress Creativity?» raises this problem: we are not taught to develop creativity, although this is necessary. On the contrary, we are taught to isolate the creative part of the personality.
You close out of fear of judgment, rejection, betrayal, loneliness, failure, and bad decisions. Self-doubt, doubts, complexes, envy and anger also contribute to this. Under the weight of these feelings, you bury your true self, as if under a mountain of garbage. But under this mountain there is still you: flair, intuition and cherished desires that barely audibly declare themselves, but you brush it all off.
It seems to you: if it were a real vocation, it would thunder like a bolt from the blue. But this is not true. In fact, there is only you and the quiet voice of your «I». Perhaps your moment of insight is a nagging feeling in your stomach or an intuition tugging at your sleeve to get attention.
Don’t ignore these subtle signs to find your destination. Stop looking for a mythical calling, instead get up, move, explore and learn. Set a goal for today: do something, create something new. Then show the result to another person and rejoice together. Repeat this tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. This is how we forge our own path.