By Barbara Sher.
Introduction
A friend’s father got it right when he said “The good life is when you get up in the morning and can’t wait to start all over again.” Is that you? Or does his idea of the good life sound like an unreachable paradise? If you aren’t the kind of person who jumps out of bed every morning excited about the day ahead, I know you desperately long to find a goal that will make you feel like my friend’s father. You crave work that will spark excitement and energy; you yearn to find the place where you can make your mark. Albert Schweitzer found his place, so did Golda Meir, and so did the kid next door who practiced guitar day and night.
They knew how to live. They believed in what they were doing with all their hearts. They knew their work was important. When you get near people who are pursuing their heart’s desire, you can see the intensity on their faces. Life is just too short to live without that kind of focus.
In the early 80s, two Harvard psychologists completed a study of people who called themselves happy. And what did happy people have in common? Money? Success? Health? Love? None of these things. They had only two things in common: They knew exactly what they wanted and they felt they were moving toward getting it. That’s what makes life feel good: when it has direction, when you’re headed straight for what you love. And I mean love. I don’t mean what you’re skilled at. I don’t really care what your skills are. I don’t believe you live the good life by doing what you can do; you live it by doing what you want to do. I don’t even think your greatest talents necessarily show up in your skills. All of us are good at things we’re not madly in love with. And all of us have talents we’ve never used.
Relying on your skills to guide you is simply unacceptable. That’s why I don’t intend to give you personality tests or skills assessments to find out what you should be doing. I know what you should be doing. You should be doing what you love. What you love is what you are gifted at. Only love will give you the drive to stick to something until you develop your gift. That’s the way really big things get accomplished in the world–by people no different than you and I who know what they want and put everything they’ve got behind it.
If you don’t know what you want, you can’t get out of the starting gate–and that’s discouraging. But you’re not alone. Recent figures show that as many as 98 percent of Americans are unhappy in their jobs. And it isn’t only financial considerations that keep them where they are; they simply don’t know what to do instead.
You do know what you want. Everybody does. That’s why you feel so restless when you can’t find the right track. You sense there’s some particular work you are meant to be doing. And you’re right. Einstein needed to formulate theories of physics, Harriet Tubman needed to guide people to freedom, and you need to follow your original vision. As Vartan Gregorian said, “The universe is not going to see someone like you again in the entire history of creation.” Each of us is one of a kind. Every living person has a completely original way of looking at the world, and originality always needs to express itself.
But many of us get stopped. Every time we resolve to change our lives, every time we go to pick up the baton and get into the race, something happens. For some mysterious reason our determination melts. We look at the baton and think “This race isn’t it.” And we put down the baton, uneasy because time is slipping away, frightened that we’ll never find “it.” There are two reasons for this. One reason it’s so hard to know what we want is that we have so many options. That wasn’t always true. Our parents and their parents had fewer choices and clearer goals. It’s a tribute to the success of our culture that so many of us have the freedom to search for our own life’s work.
Freedom is glorious. but freedom also torments us because it requires us to create our own goals.
Did you know that fewer people get depressed during war than in peacetime? In a war, everything is important. Day to day, you know exactly what to do. Your life may be frightening, but the struggle to survive gives you direction and drive. You don’t waste any time trying to figure out what you’re worth or what you’re supposed to do with your life. You just try to keep alive, save your home, help your neighbors. The reason we love to watch films about people whose lives are in danger is because every move is loaded with meaning.
When there’s no emergency to rise to, we have to create goals that have meaning. You can create such goals if you know what your dream is–but it is a relatively new way of living. The old way was to let necessity create your goal; the new way is to use your dream to create your goal. We’ve had very little practice at this new way.
I have the deepest respect for sincere curiosity–and very little respect for self-righteousness. The useful answers, the answers that help us solve problems, are always the more forgiving ones. They’re based on a line of inquiry that assumes there is always a good reason for everything.
Once you begin to find your own path, you will have positioned yourself at the forefront of a massive historical change. In late twentieth-century society, just about everybody–like it or not–is going to have to figure out what kind of work and life he really wants. Sooner or later everybody across every age group is going to have to ask “What do I want to do?”
The days are over when students took the path of least resistance to a banking career, says, or to law school and considered that one choice the end of their career planning. Last year’s college graduates, according to one research firm, can expect to hold ten to twelve jobs in three to five different fields during their working lifetime. Like it or not, everybody’s getting a second work life. Probably, a third life. Perhaps even more.
Corporations are continuing to downsize, and not only because of recent recessions. We’re entering a new period in economic history. Global competition is forcing companies to make themselves lean and mean. Corporations are becoming about a third the size they once were, and they’ll probably never get big again. Middle management is gone. Secretaries are being replaced by technology. The top twenty students from every college or business school may still get good job offers, but everyone else is on their own.
The wave of the future is clear: We’re going to be a nation of experts–consultants and entrepreneurs–many of us working at home, all of us hired on a job-by-job basis according to our special talents. And who’s going to come shining through these cultural changes? Everyone who is willing to develop what he loves into a niche for himself–a niche where he can excel. Never have we needed to locate our own gifts more.
Chapter : What Are You Supposed To Be Doing?
“I was supposed to be doing something special, but I could never figure out what that was.”
We’re all raised in families, communities, and even entire cultures that barrage us with messages about what they want from us. Sometimes these messages are as blatant as billboards: “Get married,” “Make money,” “Buy your own home.” Other times the messages are stealthy–they sneak in.
Take a moment to think about your life and your goals. Are you living up to expectations?
But I, like you, was born into a world that bombarded me with messages of what’s right and what’s wrong–and I wanted to do right.
Almost any stranger would respect our dreams more easily than our family does. If you don’t believe me try a comparison test. Next time you’re with a group of strangers, tell them the most offbeat idea you can think of. Tell them your dream is to raise dalmatians in the Himalayas, you have no contacts in Tibet. Watch their interest pick up. They’ll even try to solve your problem.
Interest is the sincerest form of respect.
You don’t love these strangers and they don’t love you, but we are all captivated by each other’s visions. It’s in our nature as humans to be intrigued with any new idea–unless we have some personal reason for not doing so. Our families have plenty of personal reasons, but a stranger is a pure soul.
Love and respect aren’t the same thing. Love is fusion. As a baby, you belong to your parents, you’re an extension of them; and fusion is good for the survival of infants. Respect is differentiation: you belong to yourself, and you’re an extension of no one. Differentiation is essential for the happiness of adults.
Chapter : How To Get Lucky
The amount of good luck that comes your way depends on your willingness to act.
Action is absolutely essential for people who don’t know what they want.
Action will help you think.
By exposing you to real-life experiences and seeing how they feel to you, action will help you do much better thinking than you could ever hope to do sitting still and weighing all the theoretical factors. Even action in the wrong direction is informative.
Most inaction isn’t because of indecision–it’s because of fear. But every time you want to do something that scares you, and you dare to do it, your self-esteem goes up a few degrees. When you’re fearful but you step forward anyway, you do yourself a great service. Even if someone slams the door in your face, refuses to answer your letter, or yells at you–the worst outcome you can imagine–it doesn’t matter. You’re a success every time you face down fear. You can feel that success. You feel elated or determined; either way, the feeling is intoxicating.
But every time you let yourself down by not acting, you can feel your self-esteem drop by a few degrees. Your morale sinks along with your self-esteem.
High self-esteem comes after action, not before.
Action will raise your self-esteem better than affirmations.
Most of the rewarding things in life–riding a bicycle, traveling in a foreign country, or making love–begin with incompetence and embarrassment. What will determine the course of your life more than any other one thing is whether or not you’re willing to tolerate necessary discomfort.
An unlived life is a kind of hell.
Good luck happens when you’re in action.
You find the best recipes and meet the best people in your life by accident.
I believe in planning, but the truth is that planning is mostly science fiction. There never was a plan that was more than a hopeful prediction.
Perhaps the best reason to plan is that following a plan gets you out into the world. If you go to the library and look up articles, call people, join organizations, go to appointments, something can happen to you.
Set a goal, any goal, and start doing everything you can think of to achieve it. I guarantee you, your life will change. You might not get where you thought you were going, but you could easily wind up somewhere better. You get breaks you never could have planned for because you never knew they existed.
Every time you have to make a choice about something, think “Does this go toward or away from what I want? Always choose what goes toward what you want. This is called following your nose.
You can trust desire.
There’s a practicality in our longings that’s beyond rational thought. Your desire will point you in the right direction better than any rules or well-meant advice.
Chapter : Resistance, or What’s Stopping You, Anyway?
Real meaning, your kind of meaning, is as pure and unique as you were as a child. We do not know where it comes from. Like your identity, it just seems to be there. It doesn’t have to be created, just discovered. Personal meaning connects your deepest gifts with the rest of the world. Whether you turn out to be a gardener or a builder, a filmmaker or a doctor–when you’re doing the right work you will feel connected, both to your soul and to the world outside you. A gardener feels he’s creating beauty and has reverence for nature. A builder or filmmaker feels she’s using her best abilities to create something to delight the world. A doctor feels he’s using his best skills and brains to heal people.
The very first step to finding work that fits you is to understand the connection between doing what you love and doing something worth doing, something that has meaning. Because they are one and the same thing.
You’ll never be happy just amusing yourself. I advise against choosing a long vacation as your life’s goal. Even in retirement, even when you’re only looking to get off the fast track and smell the roses, you should be pushing past what you merely enjoy into what has real meaning for you. When something really matters to you, you must bring it into your life.
Without an activity that really matters to you, you’re going to feel empty, even if you’ve set yourself up in Paradise and are living the life of the rich and famous. If you’re not involved in something you truly care, anyplace can seem like a prison.
If you think it’s selfish to put yourself first like this, think again, because when you’re doing work you love, it’s a gift to the world. Picasso wasn’t trying to help anybody. For that matter, Einstein wasn’t either, not when he was working on the theory of relativity. They just wanted to do their work. That work seemed very important to them and they couldn’t get their minds off it.
It’s time to dismantle the myth that says you must choose between pleasing yourself and doing something meaningful. To do one, you must do the other. To do great work, you must be in love. And with work-love, as with people-love, there’s no accounting for chemistry.
Chapter : The Sure Thing
When you play it too safe, you’re taking the biggest risk of your life.
From the front you look like you’re putting your life together very nicely, piece by piece, but behind you, time is flying out the window like dollar bills. Time is the only real wealth we’re given–but it’s half gone before we understand that, because when it comes to time, children feel like millionaires. Old people know a lot about time and will tell you freely that their greatest regrets were the things they didn’t do.
Nothing is more wasteful than ignoring what you long for. You own a great treasure that you’re not using, not sharing. Inside you is a bona fide genius who’s original, curious, and loaded with potential. That genius is dying for you to open the gates so it can jump into life with both feet. Until you act on that energy, the rest of your life goes on hold. When you have an unfulfilled wish waiting in the shadows, you don’t fully invest in your work, or your family, or your vacations for that matter, you just fool around, halfheartedly.
You must go after your wish. As soon as you start to pursue a dream, your life wakes up and everything has meaning. It doesn’t really matter what the outcome is. You’ve got to regain some meaningful direction if you want your life to be exciting.
Real adventure lifts your heart, opens your mind, and makes you catch your breath.
You do have to take an emotional chance when you let yourself love something. Daring to live your dreams is very intense. It wakes you out of that safety-sleep you’re in. Being fully creative, or fully productive, even thinking that you have the right to live a wonderful life–this is no small matter. That’s where the real fear is.
We all think we need freedom to pursue our dream, but I’ve got a surprise for you. The opposite is probably true.
Human beings need structure. We all need limits to things, even pleasurable things–and bottomless, creative things more than all the others. That job isn’t keeping Jerry from writing. It’s actually his friend. It can actually help him write.
“Now” is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream. You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes, and watch your heart start beating. You may not be able to stick with that long! At the beginning you can only handle a little of that dream at a time. It’s strong stuff. Much as we long for it, following our dreams takes a lot of courage. It’s as adventurous as you ever need to get in your life. Your feelings of safety will disappear at once, although you’ve kept job, family, and home. And your feelings of boredom will disappear right along with them.
It’s not actually the activity that creates the intensity, it’s the love itself.
[You are not your job. Just because you work as a computer programmer doesn’t mean you are a computer programmer.] If a cat has kittens in an oven, does that make them biscuits?
When you quit blaming your job you can get started right away taking real steps that will clear things up for you.
Donna has signed up for a landscape architecture class. Taking the time to learn a skill from the bottom up will help build her feeling of competence and stop her swings of grandiosity and worthlessness. Moving out of fantasy into the real work of learning a skill will give her both humility and self-confidence.
Whenever you do what you really love, your heart lifts, your mind opens, and everything changes. You wake up. That’s what true adventure really is.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. and I don’t care if that adventure takes up less than an hour a day or takes place in your living room! That’s where Einstein’s and Newton’s and Kepler’s greatest adventures took place. And Shakespeare’s and Mozart’s and Leonardo da Vinci’s too.
Creative people have a problem that looks unique, but the truth is that all of us feel exactly like them when it comes to living our dreams. Because to make art is exactly like living any dream: every moment is brand new. We all fear what’s new.
What’s dangerous about being creative? Well, for one thing, it’s scary to change gears from low-anxiety, maintenance-type activities to the intensity of a level of consciousness where everything is new. Learning and creating are high-risk enterprises.
Perhaps when you create, you see too much.
I work very hard to get used to things, to make them second nature–and so do you. I know I’ll never be able to maneuver my way through this world if everything stays brand new.
Our love of excitement and intensity is always in a struggle with our need for what is familiar. We’d never survive without being able to absorb new experiences and make them habitual.
Scolding yourself won’t do the slightest bit of good, because scolding has no effect on the will.
Being judgmental is cheap. Any fool can do it.
To cause real change you must realize there’s a good reason for your problem–and find that reason.
Why weren’t we taught the reasons for our bad behavior? I think the real reason we’re taught to be judgmental is because it’s so much easier–in the short run–than being thoughtful.
Judy took the tiniest steps so she wouldn’t activate her alarm system. Her only goal was to desensitize herself to being in motion.
Everyone who chose safety over adventure needs to practice taking tiny steps in an adventurous direction. So set a goal, no matter how tentative, and start the planning process.
Don’t set a time limit on achieving any goals or subgoals, just put them in the right order.
Begin to practice taking the small steps, doing the things you’ve avoided doing before, experiencing the “little” risks and the “little” adventures until your love of doing what you want and your experience at taking risks makes you confident enough to feel that living your biggest dream is only one more “little” risky step.
Chapter : Leaving The Ones You Love Behind
Could we please stop being Pollyannas and start admitting that the world has lots of difficult people in it? It’s not true that everyone means well and we just have misunderstandings. Sometimes there’s no misunderstanding–sometimes people want to hurt you.
Change takes time. After all, you are beginning to do the very activities you’ve been avoiding for years.
This is a new life, full of new feelings, and all the familiarity is gone. More than any other time, you should get help and support yourself. This is a time when a buddy system becomes essential. You need a friend to keep prodding you into exercising or to help you study. You’ll often be tempted to slip back to the comfort or self-sabotage whenever your new behavior makes you feel uneasy, and a buddy will calm you down and replace the comfort you’ve given up.
Chapter : I Want Too Many Things
If you, too, want to do many things and can’t make up your mind, I know something about you–because I had the same problem and I know how it feels.
It’s uncomfortable to sense that time is speeding by while you’re not getting anywhere. You’re not becoming a better dog trainer or real estate broker, you’re not becoming an authority on anything. Just at the moment you could become expert in one thing, you get interested in something else. You see people your age with no more talent or ability than you have, getting way ahead in their lives, while you’re still at the starting gate.
To make matters worse, you don’t get any respect. Our culture respects specialists. People aren’t called “Renaissance men” anymore; they’re called “dilettantes” or “jack of all trades”. And you’re probably spending too much time in a job that doesn’t mean anything to you. A person who can’t make a choice often works far below her capabilities to avoid making a commitment and to send out the message that her present job is only temporary.
The first step is to find out who you really are–that is, why you want so many things.
Being a scanner is a very respectable profession
Scanners want to taste everything. They love to learn about the structure of a flower, and they love to learn about the theory of music. And the adventures of travel. And the tangle of politics. To scanners, the universe is a treasure house full of millions of works of art, and life is hardly long enough to see them all.
Robert Frost defined divers and scanners very neatly when he said “A scholar is someone who sticks to something. A poet is someone who uses whatever sticks to him.”
Because our culture values the diver’s specialization and determination, we too often think of scanners as people who won’t get down to work. This is a foolish cultural oversight.
If you’re a scanner, you have extraordinarily special and valuable skills. You love what is new, and you don’t suffer from fear and indecisiveness. You’re highly adaptable to new cultures; you’re so flexible you can turn on a dime. You’re a lightning fast learner, curious about anything you don’t already understand; you like and respect all kinds of thinking. Although you may be unwilling to dedicate yourself to one path, you don’t lack discipline or have a low IQ. On the contrary, you’re dedicated to learning all that you can, and you’re intelligent enough to delight in all that you learn.
In many cases the only problem for scanners is finding the kind of work that will allow them to use their talent for scanning. Career aptitude tests tend to miss scanners.
Take Jack, for instance. Jack went to the most respected career testing service he could find. His tests showed he was equally skilled in music, nature, mathematics, science, and literature. As a matter of fact, there was no subject for which he showed no aptitude!
Jack knew he wouldn’t be happy with any [specialized career]: “I’ve never gotten past Anything . In college, when I would take second or third courses in some discipline, I’d feel like I was on a detour, off my path. What I really loved was the overview, the sense of where philosophy belongs in a person’s life, or physics, for that matter. Once I’d get something located, I wanted to look at something else.”
Jack wandered for a few years, until he accidentally stumbled into a writing assignment for a newsletter to be handed out at a convention for inventors. He really enjoyed interviewing all the different inventors for this article, so he went looking for other writing assignments. That was twenty years ago. Today Jack is a successful freelance writer, and he loves his life. He just got back from touring the Far East with an American opera company, and this fall he’ll be on Mont Blanc in France with a group of French mountain climbers to write about their climb. )
Jack is–and you might be–a popularizer. He can learn about biology, but what he likes to do with his knowledge of biology is translate it to the world–he’s a communicator. He’s a teacher.
It can take time and ingenuity to find a scanner’s niche, work that accommodates all of a scanners many interests. But the results are worth it.
Scanners know that life is not stingy. If anything, life is too generous. the choices are dizzying. But there’s a way to manage the riches.
But the truth is, if you want to do a lot of things, you can do them all. Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Ted Turner knew that.
First, find out if your inability to focus has a physical cause. You may be one of the many people with Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.), a physical condition caused by poor regulation of the neurotransmitters in the brain that help people focus. [If you have A.D.D.] a psychopharmacologist can prescribe caffeine or Ritalin to help you. And it’s even more important for you than for the rest of us to break down every big goal into small, specific, achievable steps and to get a person to hold you accountable for completing each of the small steps.
A commitment may feel like some kind of trap, but it isn’t. You can put your whole heart into it and give it your best–and if it doesn’t work out, it ends.
You should know what most people enjoy making commitments. They find it satisfying to dedicate themselves to learning piano or creating a garden. They like to see the results. People who fear commitment don’t get results.
Sometimes people are unusually bright can’t get past the enthusiastic, creative period where they shine and into a period where they have to slow down and learn the material. They want to follow through but they never learned how to learn. So they become frustrated with the difficulties.
They don’t understand what slower children learned very well–if you stick with learning there’s a big payoff in the end.
The overpraised child never learns how to work hard at something until he has accomplished his goal. He’s never tested his stamina or developed self-discipline and therefore lacks self-confidence.
Carol’s parents had tried to give her everything and cushion every step, but when she went to college, nobody acted like her parents. In college, you passed your exams or you were history. This depressed Carol; it seemed cold and judgmental. She eventually dropped out and came home, her self-confidence shattered. She had no tolerance for even a small amount of frustration.
Frustration is supposed to create action, not make you give up. We all need to learn how to handle frustrations so we can stick with things until we have some capability; that’s how to develop self-confidence.
You’ve got to force yourself to stick to your work. Nine times out of ten, completing a project will make you feel much better–even when it feels meaningless. More than most people, you need to experience pushing right through your discomfort and coming out the other side. It can be a revelation.
A person who has taken the time to learn his craft doesn’t bother himself wondering whether he’s a great master or just a minor talent. He no longer knows or cares about what such words mean. He’s concerned with improving a technique or expressing an idea and has no time for self-evaluation.
A commitment to challenging work takes your attention off yourself at the same time it quietly adds to your self-esteem. Mastery gives life meaning. Learning to master a skill–any skill–is like having a keel on your boat. Mastery will steady you and calm your fears.
You need to let this information seep into you: When you stick with something you learn things you can’t learn any other way. You learn that beginnings do not represent complete experiences.
But ineptitude and frustration will pass, and then you’ll start to feel pleasure with acquiring a new skill.
Commitment and mastery do not close doors; they open them. For the first time you will begin to know what high achievers always knew: making a choice doesn’t lock you into limits, it sets you free to fully develop your gifts.
Chapter : On The Wrong Track, And Moving Fast
Now, if you follow my definition, a winner is anyone who is doing what he or she loves. Whatever that may be! And a loser is someone who is losing time doing something they don’t like. My losers list includes anybody in a Rolls-Royce who isn’t happy. Because they haven’t yet invented the shiny thing that makes up for the loss of a fulfilled life.
If you don’t get to live your life, you’ve lost an incalculable treasure. Fate gives every single one of us the most astonishing uniqueness. Each person is a complex mesh of finely woven styles, viewpoints, abilities, tastes, and gifts. There’s no one in the world who can do what you can do, who can think and see the way you do, who can create what you can create.
Listen to me carefully: If you’re unhappy, something important is going on. When your body hurts, it needs attention. When your heart hurts, it needs just as much attention. You mind knows what you’ve been taught, but your heart knows who you really are. And it’s trying to tell you something! Pay attention or your spirit will get worn out. It’s possible that you’re going to need a complete overhaul of your definition of success. I’m extremely cautious about burning bridges, but this is one area where you might have to change everything around. You’ve got to make sure that this success is really yours, not somebody else’s, and that it really suits who you are.
I just want you to stop thinking that your story has already been written. The stakes may seem high to you, because you’ve got something to lose, but your life is too precious and rare to give away to a culture that doesn’t know who you really are. Your past does not have to control your future. As a matter of fact, your past–along with your present–is going to help you create a real life if you want one.
The cure for sorrow is to learn something.
You need to find out what you really love, and forget about what you’re capable of. You’re obviously capable of achieving a lot, but ability can never take the place of desire. Don’t be tempted to do something just because you can.
I know very well that it’s not easy to recover that fierce and loving core inside you, that private language that I call your “genius.” It’s been covered up by a well-meaning cultural program designed to teach you the language of your society. Still, there are pointers everywhere, indications of your true gifts, and they’re not hard to find as long as you aren’t misled into thinking that your genius is the same as your skills and abilities. That’s just your surface. Your skills and abilities are valuable, no question about it. They’ll keep you alive. But skill alone won’t make you happy.
Look around at what you love, what you’d do with your time if all the necessities were taken care of. Look at what lifts your heart, and you’ll hear your genius talking. Follow that voice, and you’ll find your gifts–not just your abilities.
If you can’t remember a dream, there are lots of ways you can awaken your original self–the one that did the dreaming; that creative, hopeful person I know you were before you ever heard of a grade point average or investment banking.
[To help you find yourself], write short vignettes, at random, about moments out of your childhood. Anything before you graduated from high school–the earlier, the better–should refresh you enormously and remind you of who you were.
What you’re doing now is gathering together raw materials for your personal life sculpture, and that’s why I want you gathering marble from brand-new quarries. You never know what’s been passed over in the narrow path you had to choose. Focused people often do well, but they pay a price for it, and often cannot regroup when the time comes because their experience isn’t wide enough.
Play with different experiences, and check out your interests, and try on different lives in your mind. Pay careful attention to anything that excites you–even a little. Interest is a powerful clue, and any stirrings will unfold into a bigger picture if you are patient with those messages you’re getting from your original self.
I believe you can have whatever you really want in this life, in one form or another, sooner or later. All you have to do is take care of your health and be lucky enough to live for a while. But you can’t have it all at once and you can’t have it forever. No life has room for everything in it, not on the same day.
You can keep moving, or you can stand still. You can hang on to what you’ve got, or you can move on to the next stage.
Even if you change careers, you can take what you like about your job and leave the rest behind you for something far more satisfying. If you’ve been through undergraduate and professional school, you’ve got transferable skills. If the work isn’t what you expected, don’t despair. Go looking for something you love, and take your skills along with you.
Chapter : Help! I’m Not Ready To Be Born Yet
What do you do after you leave the wrong job? Well, you’ve learned a lot more about what you like and what you don’t than you learned in school.
We’re so goal-happy in this culture that we try to set goals even if we don’t have any information. But if it’s too hard for you to work the way I’m advising, without direction, if you really feel you need a goal, there’s something you can do, even without information: set a working goal.
A working goal is a goal will probably be changed. It’s like the working title of a movie or book or song. You name your work-in-progress something that’s not exactly right just so you can write the thing, and when it’s finished you change the name. Just set your goal…and create a plan to get there. Then follow that plan until you discover something more interesting. That’s the best thing about goals–they push you into action. and that’s when happy accidents occur. )
It’s also possible to set a direction without goals or plans at all. How? Just follow your nose. Just keep yourself moving toward anything that interests you, and away from anything dull–even if you don’t know why. Like a plant bending toward the sun, you’ll ultimately find yourself growing toward what you love.
Your interests are a surefire indicator of your talents. There’s no way you can know all the things you’re talented at, because you haven’t encountered them yet. But if you have respect for your curiosity, you’ll discover new talents in every job you have.
Life is shoving you faster than you’d like to go, and there’s no way you’re going to avoid moving, either now or later.
If you need to get organized, you can learn how at work.
Chapter : Nothing Ever Interests Me
She was one of those people who fantasize because they find reality a disappointment. Some people assume that this is normal, characteristic of all of us, but that’s not so. We don’t all prefer fantasy to life; we don’t all find life a disappointment. If you do, it’s very important to take a careful look at the causes of your disappointment.
Just understanding what troubles us, realizing that each of our difficulties has a name, a cause, a logic to it, is liberating. Nothing can make you feel as helpless as ignorance, and the truth can set you free.
If you…can’t seem to get untangled from a negative relationship, you need a strategy to keep from being pulled into any games.
Life isn’t supposed to be an all-or-nothing battle between misery and bliss. Life isn’t supposed to be a battle at all.
The worst thing that can happen to you as an enthusiastic adult is that you could appear foolish to people who need to criticize. Let me assure you–enthusiasm is worth this risk. If you allow yourself to be enthusiastic, you’ll be so full of wonder, you won’t care what people think.
Chapter : A Rage Against The Ordinary
An extraordinary life, a life filled with great accomplishments, is also filled with a myriad of very mundane details, hard work, and patience. Famous scientists have to pay their electric bills and walk their dogs. Successful actors have to stand in line at the supermarket. Everybody’s day-to-day life is ordinary.
Extraordinary people don’t waste any energy raging against the ordinary–they don’t even care about what’s ordinary and what’s not. They’re too busy taking one small step after another. You may be a prodigy, born with a whole range of talents, but the more gifted you are, the harder and longer you must work to create something that matches your vision. Talent plus patience will allow you to master your craft–and mastery is what gets you your dream.
The good news is you can have whatever the adult in you wants. You can have a great job. You can do what you love, become well-known, accomplished, respected, have joy. You can make grand things happen, see foreign lands, find a mate, have a family, be a star. Every magnificent adult dream you can dream is possible for you.
Selfishness–even in the name of an injustice–lowers your self-respect and creates shame.
It takes a strong ego to take any job and remember you’re still yourself. If you feel defined by any job, your self-image isn’t solid enough.
The French novelist AndrŽ Gide wrote about Constructive Altruism in his Nobel Prize-winning journals:
Each one of these young writers analyzing his suffering from…mystic aspirations, or from unrest, or from boredom, would be cured at once if he strove to cure or to relieve the real sufferings of those around him. We who have been favored have no right to complain. If, with all we have, we still don’t know how to be happy, this is because we have a false idea of happiness. When we understand that the secret of happiness lies not in possessing but in giving, by making others happy we shall be happier ourselves.
You’re a great dreamer; now go for your dream the right way. Give your dreams a fighting chance. You’ve proven that you can be unstoppable. Now make some unstoppable progress. How? Be a farmer, not a night raider.
Be as responsible and hardworking as a farmer. Go out and get a steady job and earn some money. You need to teach yourself that you have the power to fix your own life; you need to understand that money, skill, and wisdom accumulate bit by bit, over time; you need to learn how to delay gratification.
You need to acquire a real craft and quit flying by the seat of your pants like a special person who doesn’t have to obey the rules. You need to learn to plan and enjoy going after what you want instead of waiting for it to come to you. You have right to go out and get what you want.
Changing is hard work. But let me quote Gide again: “How often have I directed my attention, my study, to this or that fugue of Bach…precisely because in the beginning it discouraged me…guided by that obscure feeling that what thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most.”
“I’ve learned something totally new to me,” Yona said. “It’s called ‘patience.’ The opposite of rage has turned out to be patience. I’m patiently developing my career, for one thing.”
Chapter : The Red Herring
You cannot tell your heart what it wants. Your heart will tell you. When you try to force your feelings to submit to your mind, it’s like throwing away the map to a happy life. It’s a terrific way to get totally lost. Your heart is the center of a million-year-old survival system. If it’s longing for love, there’s a good reason.
So if you’re having a hard time getting to work on what you’re supposed to be doing because something else keeps distracting you, you’d better put down your tools, quit trying to work, and start listening to the messages from your heart.
But if you think solitary people are wasting a wonderful opportunity for connection, if you’re somebody who has a genuine gift for good relationships, you will not be happy alone. If you want love, then love is what you must go after; you must at least give it your best try.
If you go after the thing you want most, you’ll be in a much better position to go after anything else you want.
Get your priorities in line. Do first things first. If your stomach is empty, get something to eat. If your mind is empty, go back to school. If your heart is empty, get your love life straightened out. Getting your love life in order can be the most efficient thing you can do toward getting a great career.
If love is what you want, you must try to get it. Having love will make your work life better.
Epilogue
Understanding leads to action.
Langston Hughes said a dream deferred “dries up, like a raisin in the sun.” It atrophies, in other words, just like an unused limb. A dream lived, however, a dream that gets daily workouts, becomes stronger with each passing day. More beautiful. More healthy from exercise. More sustaining.
And who knows where such strength will carry you? Novalis, an eighteenth-century poet, said, “We are human and our lot is to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds.”