What should I do with my Life?
I bought a book a while back by Po Bronson called "What Should I do with my Life?" The cover was bright-red and when I picked it up, I knew it was the red color psychologically triggering me to pay attention to it. I'm glad I gave in to this marketing trick.
The book is not a novel, nor is it a self-help book claiming to have all the answers, but a collection of stories of how people realized their true potential or found a meaning to their lives. There are some who struggled for decades, some who did massive career changes and then there are some who followed the obvious path that they had been ignoring for a while. The book doesn't give direct answers, but it provided so much insight (at least to me) that I felt it truly helped me understand myself better. If I ever was delusional about having an epiphany at one point of my life about my true calling, I realized after reading the book that most likely it wouldn't unfold that way for me.
"Do not wait for the kind of clarity that comes with epiphanies. In the nine hundred plus stories I heard in my research, almost nobody was struck with an epiphany. It was one of my biggest surprises. Most people had a slim notion or a slight urge that they slowly nurtured until it grew into a faint hope which barely stayed alive for years until it could mature into a vision. -- Don't doubt your desire because it comes to you as a whisper; don't think, "If it were really important to me, I'd feel clearer about this, less conflicted." My research didn't show that to be true. The things we really want to do are usually the ones that scare us the most. The things you'll not feel conflicted about are the choices that leave no one hurt."
Normally, when reading a book, I might write down a quote or two that really hit home with me, but this time I wrote two full pages, like the one above. I did so not least because two of my friends asked me to let them know if the book was any good. The more I talked about reading this book to people around me, the more people told me about their own struggles about finding a path or discovering their true calling. This really seemed to be a universal issue. Perhaps it was the age: I mostly talked about finding a calling with women of my own age and older. The 30-40-year-old mothers felt it was about time they decided and worked towards a real goal now that their kids were out of diapers. Some felt lost with their search just as myself before reading the book. Perhaps it was the time: our society was changing and with it the way people work, too.
A very dear someone once said to me I have way too many interests and it's complicating my choice for a career. His notion got me upset and thinking. Many interests are not bad, but sometimes it complicates when the choices seem so vast.
"At one point in his life, it was hard to say - were these creative hobbies the seeds of future passions? -- He wondered, should he continue to pursue them? And if so, which one?"
"There's a difference between something that stimulates you for a year and something you can be passionate about for ten years. What is the difference? One thing is not ten times more stimulating than the other. The difference is whether your heart's in it. You don't find your purpose above the neck. If you use your brain to solve this problem, you'll usually end up with an answer that only makes your brain happy."
"The traditional search for a career begins with the question "what am I good at?" But that's not the right starting point for finding a calling. You can get good at what you need to serve what you believe in. You can learn Spanish, you can learn budgets, you can learn to listen. The true search is for what you believe in."
Thinking about it and feeling it were completely different from one another, and this notion took me a big step closer of what I felt for a long time I was supposed to be. I had been denying my true passion, because I was constantly seeing it as a silly dream. Regardless of the fact that it was something I had been doing since I was four, enjoyed it immensely and as a 19-year-old had even written it down on a list of "this is what I will become when I grow up" next to "a mother". This was so deep-rooted in me that I did in fact only knew I wanted to be a mother and this other thing. Yet I was brushing it aside, because it felt like a cliché and because I constantly compared myself to others.
"Never underestimate our ability to ignore the obvious. So often, that's what keeps us from clarity - not a lack of desire."
"The goal is to bring what you do in alignment with who you are, so you don't end up being someone you don't want to be."
"At some point, we have to give up the habit of measuring ourselves against our peers."
"It's a shame if people neglect what they can become."
While reading this book, I continued searching my answers everywhere else, too. I listened to people discussing about this, I talked to my friends about the subject, I asked questions and I watched YouTube videos of people who had dedicated themselves to help others find their truest passions. One of the videos talked about how people often fought against the obvious thing and belittled themselves, because they didn't feel ready or good enough. I found myself in those words more deeply than I had imagined. But finally I was getting there. I had matured enough to give up comparisons. I gave in and listened to myself, honestly listened to myself, and finally I realized the only thing I have second to none insecurities is likely to be the one I should be doing.
"Acknowledging your potential is setting yourself up to be criticized for being willing to stand out, and nobody wants to be laughed at. That fear held me back for some time."
"I realized I had it in me to be successful. I was tired of struggling - tired of thinking that life was a struggle. So I decided to be successful. Why not? Why not me?"
"I made a conscious decision to listen to my calls and direct myself to greatness. Once I chose to stop denying what made me happy, my life very naturally evolved."
So here I am. What my next step will be, I have to give it a good thought. But thinking about it doesn't scare me anymore, because the decision is not all over the place any longer now that I have it narrowed down. I have been spending nearly a decade at home having and raising children, but I don't regret not figuring myself out sooner. It has been a tough path, but every step through that dense jungle needed to happen in order for me to finally arrive on the other side. I had been looking up for others for my answers, when I had failed to make one myself, only to learn that's not at all how it works.
"The hardest thing about doing the right thing for yourself is you usually have to do it alone."
"Very few people get it right without missteps. It's normal to have gotten off track for long periods."
"If you want to give yourself a fair chance to succeed, never expect too much too soon."
I needed to become a mom first. I needed that time to think, grow and search. A friend of mine said wisely that becoming a parent makes you want to do something meaningful, because you don't want to leave your child behind for a bad job. Reading Bronson's book I found out this was not the case for everyone, but definitely a case for myself. I wasn't going to just settle after searching this long.
"Patience, long-term planning, resilience. That when you embrace your true identity, you will discover a productive power you never imagined having."
"Becoming a parent can trigger a return of meaning, a sort of meaning audit. The relationships with your child is so meaningful it can reveal just how meaningless other things in your life are. And people deal with this information in opposite ways. Many people suddenly are relieved of the burden of finding meaningful work. They're perfectly content to punch the clock, family provides meaning now. If they can afford to, they'd rather stay home with the kids. But just as commonly, this meaning audit compels people to hold a higher standard to their life; they can no longer waste half their waking hours on some job that doesn't do it for them. They don't want their child to watch them lead a dispassionate life."
If anything I have learned by reading this book and talking about the subject with my friends, is that the struggle is universal, but everyone's answers are different. The quotes that I picked out of the book aren't the same ones that resonate with other readers. This said, I can only recommend anyone searching for the answer to read this book.
"We all share this human experience. We are all looking for "rightness". We are all struggling to transcend the way our class has defined us. We are all trying to know ourselves. We are all looking for an environment that nurtures our soul. We are all trying to balance the needs and desires of our families. We are all trying to keep the Big Picture in mind. This unites us, not divides us."
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