A
few people are blessed to realize early on in life what their true passion is
and are capable of making a career out of it. A second group of people knows
what their life’s calling is but are too afraid, for any number of reasons, to
pursue it as a career. Then there are the majority of us that spend most of our
lifetimes trading hours for dollars in a career that can be tolerated but is
personally unfulfilling – never giving a thought to what it is that we would ultimately
like to accomplish in our very finite lifetimes.
I
consider myself one of the few blessed. I work virtually every day, because I
love what I do. I have known what I wanted to be since the age of ten. Yet,
even I was sidetracked for a short time by the enticements of corporate titles,
steady paychecks, and pats on the back from executives who, truth be told,
would have thrown me under a bus at a moment’s notice to save their own
careers.
Then
life happened. The shit hit the fan in triplicate, and I was left contemplating
whether to continue down my current path or skip both forks in the road and
blaze right through the woods to the destiny that called me. Some people never
have that head-in-the-hands, heart-wrenching moment, and so they just carry on
as pretenders – doers of all things other than what they were put on Earth to
do.
I
was compelled to write this post based on a conversation that I had last week
with a senior executive who is struggling to come to terms with his life and
his career. He knows what he is doing is not his passion, and has at least
three things he would rather be doing for a living. Struggling to prioritize
those things and decide which to do, he asked “How do I know which is my life’s
calling? How do I know if I can be happy doing it for the rest of my life?”
My
answer started with three questions back to him:
1. Are you willing and capable of taking a temporary pay
cut?
2. Are you willing to work more hours and perform more
administrative tasks than you have ever had to perform before?
3. How many vacation days do you have saved for this
year?
He
answered yes, yes, and 13 days. My recommendation made sense to him:
“Sell
your Mercedes and stop eating out. Take the thirteen days off (that’s seventeen
total days, now that you work weekends), and spend at least ten hours a day on
your first passion choice. Get a business license, create a marketing plan,
hire an attorney, set up your accounting records, purchase your capital
equipment, build your website, create your first product and begin to sell it.
If you do that, you will have worked five weeks as compared to your current
forty hour a week job.
On
day eighteen, if you find yourself running back to the serenity of your
corporate position, you have not found your life’s calling. You have found a
hobby. You will need to repeat this process next year with your second passion
choice.
On the other hand, if you find yourself compelled
to work another seventeen days without a break, you’ve probably found your life’s
passion, and there is nothing that can stop you now.”
