Recognizing the Limits of “Do What You Love”

In the last post I mentioned that finding your purpose might just be as easy as figuring out what you love doing and what you are good at doing and then figuring out how to make a living doing just that.

Works … sometimes.  Think about it.  How many starving artists and musicians are there?  How many frustrated athletes who were the best in their high school and never started in college let alone get into the pros.  Plenty of stories of people who followed their dream into bankruptcy.

What happened?  If this is my “purpose” Mr Smart Guy, why didnt I succeed.  Where is my Nike endorsement contract?  Why doesnt The Donald return my calls?  Why is God messing with me.

Actor Kirk Douglas had a great line (paraphrasing): “God answers all prayers.  Sometimes the answer is ‘No.’” I suppose the quick way to wind down this post (part of my committment to write shorter blog posts) is when you are looking for your purpose, your passion your place, you have to be honest with yourself: is this real or just something you THINK you want?  It is referred to as a ‘calling’ for a reason: is this what is really calling you or is it your ego talking?  Recognizing that it doesnt always work out and you may have to ‘do what pays,’ for awhile longer while the planets line up is a call you may have to make.

I quit a long - and highly profitable - career in engineering to do my own thing.  I was pretty successful but a) it was not quite right (more on that in a later blog) and b) I was not paying my bills (that is called cash flow negative in the financial parlance.  I more into the idea of writing a book and being a trainer/speaker than having that be a call I was answering.  So I went back to work in engineering.  Now, my situation has changed in many ways and I am getting back into writing and speaking for more of the right reasons than I had before.  I’ll get to that next post.

Heard a good joke from a homeless woman yesterday on the beach in La Jolla, CA:

What to know how to make God laugh?  Tell Him your plans for the day.

Making Money

Is that title clear enough?

OK, well forget it for now. You dont want money. I have said this before but it is very relevant now and I am going to say it again: You Dont Want Money.

You want what money gets you: food, shelter, security …. the basic survival stuff but also better education and health care, funds to contribute to those things you want to support, resources to go off into the world and explore and learn. Etc. Etc.

Yes, money is useful BUT considering that an obsession with more and more money, greed in the most insidious sense of the word, is what got us into this mess we are currently in here in the first month of 2009, we need to REALLY think about what is important to us and our lives beyond money.

Get back to the values that (most of us) were brought up believing: integrity, an honest days work for an honest wage (or, in my verbiage, an equitable exchange of value), family, giving back, etc.

More on this later. And more on making money too (oh yeah, forgot that this is where I started).