Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.
The myth of the straight line
We have this idea that successful lives are linear, that if you were really meant to be a pianist or an engineer or a kindergarten teacher that the seeds of that life would have been manifest in our earliest days.
This is only reinforced by the way we talk and think about celebrities or “great people” – Tiger Woods, Mozart, Jodie Foster, Mahatma Ghandi. Whatever the reality, we want their lives to be written like novels, full of foreshadowing and fulfillment. It meets some deep need in us for resolution.
But as Mark Twain famously said, “Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
We aren’t likely to become celebrities
There are lots of reasons why our lives aren’t going to look like the public version of theirs.
First off, the narrative of their lives published in glossy magazines and thick biographies is likely to be much, much, much different than their lived experience of their lives. We can’t compare our insides to their outsides any more than we can compare their insides to their outsides. They’re always different.
Second, the people who get profiled and written about are nearly always the best of the best of the best. They’ve risen to the top of a very narrow field, and to do that requires the proverbial 10,000 hours of deep practice. Crazy focus is the wages of reaching those heights.
But I’m going to guess that you don’t actually want to be Tiger Woods or Jodie Foster.
Let’s define success
Our culture likes to define success in terms of three things: fame, money, and prestige. Ideally you want all three, but any one will do.
While I’m sure none of us would turn down the kind of money thrown around in “successful” circles, I’d also challenge us to think more deeply about what it means to be successful.
When researchers study happiness, what they find is that it’s not money that makes people happy, nor success as conventionally defined. Rather, it’s time spent in work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to the individual.
Back to this idea of linearity
All of that means that, as we grow as people and as we have ongoing experiences both professional and personal, what is going to be challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us is likely to shift over time. If it didn’t, challenging would soon become monumentally frustrating. Absorbing would become obsessing. Meaningful would become proving a point.
For those of us who aren’t going to be the very best ball player or flautist or dancer or corporate raider or whatever in the whole entire world, we don’t need 10,000 hours in one thing. We need constant growth and curiosity and exploration.
Our lives don’t have to be linear, because we’re writing a different narrative.
That doesn’t meant that, as we find and explore the work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us that there won’t be threads that connect the different eras of our lives – because there will be. We will always be ourselves doing all of these things.
But it does mean that we don’t have to identify or understand the thread in the present. Our only job is to continually seek out work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us.
The wide, wide world
One of the challenges of a non-linear life is being able to identify what comes next.
When things are linear, there’s a clear next step. When our lives are non-linear, we often have to seek out the next step. That can be frightening both the possibilities are both infinite and unknown. There are far more jobs and careers out there than are dreamt of in our academic philosophy.
But there are ways to tame that fear, because there are ways to both explore the unknown and limit the infinite. Remember – in a non-linear life, your job is not finding the Thing You Will Do Forever. It’s only finding the Next Right Step.
And that is simply a matter of marrying your curiosity to some everyday explorations.
Jo VanEvery and I are teaching an 8-week class by conference call that helps you do just that. If you’re interested in learning more, click here.
But whatever you do, remember that what comes next doesn’t have to be determined by what came before it. It only needs to be something challenging, absorbing, and meaningful.
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