Well, if at any point you have had this question in your life, I guess I owe you a warm welcome to the club, the one where people actually acknowledge the truth :) . I am sure there have been quite a few times where we had this question and struggled to find answers for the same. Thought we’d share a few points as to what came out of that struggle as a lesson, some through our own, some through others.
1) Who are you?
It goes without a saying that you are the most important entity of this endeavour, this is a journey where you try to discover who you are, what you like. Most times in life we have been asked the question as to who we are not and we have always had long answers for them. But for the question as to who we are, it sort of stops us on our tracks cos there are so many things which we can write about it and most times this being the reason why we don’t actually try.
But try to answer it anyway – Who are you? What emotions define you? What do you want to be? How do you want your friends/family/neighbours to see you? How do you want your peers to feel about you? What do you want to be doing – if not in the exact sense, it can be as broad as – helping people, creating a difference, making a discovery. Imagine a picture of yourself doing all these things. It is a fresh start, it is a great start and the first step towards the process of self discovery,
2) Believe that there is a way
Since you are trying to figure out what you like, what you want to do with your life, let us start with a clear cut faith – Whatever I think, it is going to be possible, there is no negative answer for this. Like I said, lets not worry about the limitations and the practicality and why things may not work right, this is about figuring out what you want out of life and we don’t want you to be limiting your options.
I know this might not be sounding very practical, but who in their right senses wants to be practical? If everyone in this world was practical, we’d have never had aircrafts, never been to the moon and never found the computers. So please, don’t be practical yet!
3) Organize the priorities
Now that you know what all you like, let’s reorganize and identify ways that we can have all of these. Well I don’t mean to say you’d have an answer as to what you’d want to be doing for the rest of your life, but you know what you want, the kind of emotions you need and the kind of thoughts that need exposure on a regular basis.
Try identifying places and solutions where you get opportunities for these thoughts to expand. I agree you won’t find a single thing that can cater to all of these, if you do, you’re extremely lucky, but if you are like me, then lets keep exploring. Identify which opportunities can give you these exposures
4) Do you know someone doing what you like?
Do you know someone doing something similar? Someone whom you can idolize, someone you can learn from, someone who has done those things and found ways to work it, that someone who can act as a constant source of motivation for you. It may be the biggest achievers in the world or the localized heros and it maybe multiple heros.
You need not be a duplicate of a single hero, you can have traits of all the people you like and expand them and be that unique person with elevated attributes since you are emulating the best
5) Don’t use this as an excuse
If you keep saying you don’t know what you want to do with your life, there are very few people who can help you with it. Try asking the question, what can I do to know what I want to do? Listen to your base emotions, talk to yourself, talk to the people who like you and whom you like – Keep asking the question for options, not for sympathy. Cos sympathy is very easy to get, you want solutions, you want ways and you want results.
6) Get into action
It is very easy to be lost in a thought process and it is a vicious cycle to be honest, it won’t give you more results. Action is the one place where you can expect something to happen. I am not saying that you should stop thinking, let it take the back stage for a while, meanwhile you get to test the waters, see what is what, an idea which may seem romantic at the outset can impose a whole new set of challenges when you start, these will tell you how strong your passions are.
Be in the action, there is never going to be a place where you will fall in love with everything you do, there will be stuff that you don’t like but don’t let that bother you, on a larger note what you are looking at is the best possible scenario, please don’t confuse it with an ideal specious one.
7) Give passion the time it deserves
If you have a faint idea about something, give it a start, test the waters, jump in. It is a very natural phenomenon to have cold feet while starting something new, one of the most common reasons being – I am not 100% sure, well NO ONE IS! So, start!
Give it a go. Most times passion is not something very obvious, it is an attribute which needs a calling, it needs its own amount of hardwork and then you realize it was something which was staring at you all along.
Passion changes its forms, it grows along with you. You don’t need to wait for that to happen, it happens automatically, but it is very clever, it wants the ground work to be done and shows itself only when called upon. Give it the time it deserves
8) Take the plunge
Jump in, this is a BIG world with loads of opportunities, just cos you don’t see everything right now doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It very much does and it needs time to appear, so forget worrying about a lot of things and start. All you need to answer right now is whether you like it and if the answer is yes, you should give it a go!
Don’t be afraid to take risks, be experimental, be patient, for a persevering person, the results are never far.
We may have said a lot of things here, not all of it is going to be of use, infact you might find only a couple interesting, well use those two, forget the rest, all we want to do is to find a way, and if we have a hit ratio of 2 out of 8, we are counting it as a success ;).
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Nice post.
It’s really tough to come out of your comfort zone and work extra hard to gain something. But once you do that, the self satisfaction you gain from the hard work and the sweetness of the victory will bring a new meaning to your life. Hardly we follow those!
Thanks for a valuable post Vinay.
True Krishna, I guess the comfort zone is a neat place, all it needs is a lil more push from there , a lil discomfort to get us into action . Like you said , the amount of satisfaction we get is addictive. It just needs a start and once it happens, the rest will be so much more fun :) ..
Thank you for the thoughts Krishna, always a nice feeling to hear from you :) h
There are two aspects to the question. One is daily life related and second is more broad metaphysical. Which one are you asking? If it is the first one, we need to start with one area and try to do our best. If it is the broader question, then we really need a guide before we take a plunge.
Thank you Abhijit, I think it is a very interesting dimension you present here. I guess the most direct relevance of the article is of the day to day life, dealing with the individual challenges and raising the quality of our living.
However taking the metaphysical route, I would believe that everything we do is finally trying to shape us, define us, redefine us and make us the beautiful people we all are. In the process, I believe we might be answering the broader question as well since that is a much longer journey fragmented into smaller ones of daily life. In other words, everything we are today defines the tomorrow and takes us to that broader path of the meta physical world..
To be honest I find it a fascinating sector to be on a metaphysical front. So glad to be reading this comment from you, it most certainly offers us a beautiful dimension to think :)
Would be lovely to hear more from you.
Cheers,
V
I am still figuring out what to do… :P take the plunge!! that’s brilliant. I did that with blogging. and it has helped in so many other ways than just putting my thoughts in words. I love teaching and interacting with students. Hope to get back to teaching soon :) nice and useful writeup :)
Thank you Preethi. I am so glad you like it. I am sort of taking your comments as an indication as to how good the articles are :). Always a delight to hear from you.
True I think, no matter what we do, we will always have that question as to what next, it is perhaps the most continuous question we will have in our lives and the msot beautiful one as well. The journey is brilliant and the plunge is addictive, you do it once, you keep doing it over and over again :)
thank you. That’s very kind of you to say :)
:)
I dont know what I want to do with my life http://t.co/2ghhaRfpQK
Agree with your points :)
Thanks for sharing!
:) Glad you liked it Ankita..
According to me what you said is a real tough thing to do… I was just discussing with a friend that how we wished to do big in our lives and now how we think small about our lives. It’s difficult to get out this complexity. However, the complexity is on the wrong side. What you said must be followed and one shall keep working without an excuse. :)
Thank you Namrata :). I do understand, it is definitely very challenging to come out of the complexity, and I do agree that there will be varying set of emotions to challenge us at every step. But I guess at some point, we have to do it just for the sake of it.. I mean the only only precious thing that can stop us is TIME or ourselves, the rest is reasons we end up giving… And those have a limited reach..
Thanks Namrata, always a delight to hear from you :)
I dont know what I want to do with my life http://t.co/T3OBklYvfB