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.