Here is my take on living your life for you, in all of its flamboyant glory..

You Be You, and let Me Be Me

Success is a product of our own achievements measured against our own expectations. All too often we make the mistake of evaluating our own success by the measurements of outsiders. We let family, friends, school, work, culture, and society dominate our thoughts and beliefs, and ultimately our time. We don’t give credence to what we want to do; we give credence to the ideas around us. That’s not to say that other people, places, cultures, etc. don’t shape us. They do, and they should.

Our surroundings are inevitably an important part of who we are, as they make up the being that we are and have become. But that’s it, we are still our own being, and influenced or not, we are a product of our own experiences. We have our own beliefs, ideas, wants, and desires. It is a scary thing to produce a goal when we are not living the means of our life. Rather, it is the passion that we pursue that can define a goal. It is the passion that we embody that will give us fulfillment. It is better, then, to follow your passion, or if unknown, then to find it. It is the finding it where I want to focus.

All too often we are left wanting, without any idea of what it actually is that we are wanting for. We are paraded through from activity to activity, from obligation on. We start off in a system and do our best to find our place. We go to school where we find ourselves herded along in an environment that others have deemed appropriate. We get pressured into getting good grades so we can get into more school, better school. Most of us jump right into something we feel we are supposed to like or do. We graduate without any sense of purpose and eventually give in to it all just for something to do.

We put our head down; hoping that working hard will somehow reveal to us what we want to do. We get a fuzzy picture of what we want, but dammit it probably means more school. We are now fully entrenched in the cog and the system. We are getting closer and closer to replacing our real passion, with cheap imitations. We hit the end of it all and there’s only one thing left to do. We settle.

But we don’t have to settle. Of course, for a lot of us, we don’t really have an idea of what we want to do until we are doing something that we don’t want to do. This is natural, and it plays into how our experiences and the things around us influence and shape us. We don’t have to put our head down and run despite not knowing where we are going. We don’t have to do more than what we need to.

This might appear to seem obvious to people, but I assure you it is not. We shouldn’t work excessively hard in the hopes that it will somehow get us what we want, or worse, advance us towards ill-conceived goals. We should instead put in the bare minimum in order to achieve relative success. This is easily demonstrated through examining high school education.

High schoolers would be lucky if they knew what they wanted to do a month in advance, let alone for the rest of their life. Further, there is a very low likelihood that an individual will finish as the valedictorian. The only real requirement of high schoolers is to figure out what they might be interested in. We live in a very competitive world and so it is paramount for a student to understand what options lay in-front of them. For example, high schoolers need to know what college or university programs they might be interested in and what requirements those programs demand. Let’s say that the minimum grade for such a program is 90%. Because we know that an individual is very unlikely to finish as the valedictorian, and we also know the minimum requirement of 90%, then it follows that student’s should put in the bare minimum effort to achieve 90%. In this context, there is virtually no benefit of getting 91%, 92%, 93%, etc. Instead, the student would find it more beneficial to spend time perfecting a craft, or figuring out what they want to do.

It follows that in everything where our goals are not necessarily our own, or when our activities don’t demonstrate our passion, that we should direct our energy towards finding our passion. It is necessary that an individual who wants to be truly successful must exploit the environment that they live in. They must challenge the designs of what they do or why. They must forget the goals of the others, and relentlessly pursue their passion. It is then, and only then that an individual will find true success. It is then that somebody finds purpose, and it is only when you can live your passion that you can be truly satisfied, truly happy.