By Prabhat Gautam CSE
! ARTICLES THAT CAN
CHANGE MY LIFE!
THESE
ARE THOSE PERSONS WHO ARE THE GIFT OF THE GOD IN THIS WORLD .AND WHO HAD MADE
THEMSELVES A LEGEND.
READ
THIS AND I GURANTEED THAT THERE WILL BE A DRASTIC CHANGE IN EVERYONES LIFE.THEY
ARE AS FOLLOWS:-
#1 –
Steve Jobs’
For teaching
me to stop attributing value to unimportant things, and start trusting my
instincts. Before reading Jobs’ speech, I was working a job I hated because it
was really the only thing I ever tried. It was what I knew.
Jobs says “You’ve got to find what you love.” His article
helped me realize that I was wasting my life living someone else’s dream. If I
settled for someone else’s dream, I’d grow old and die without ever seeking my
own.
'You've
got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is a prepared text of the
Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of
Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at
your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never
graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to
a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories:-
STAY HUNGRY STAY FOOLISH!
The first story is about connecting
the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after
the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months
or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My
biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided
to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by
college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a
lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last
minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting
list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected
baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My
biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college
and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign
the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents
promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to
college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as
Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my
college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no
idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help
me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved
their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work
out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the
best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the
required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones
that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have
a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles
for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town
every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I
loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition
turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered
perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus
every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided
to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and
san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter
combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,
historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I
found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any
practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing
the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all
into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had
never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had
multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just
copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had
never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and
personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of
course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots
looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to
trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in
something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never
let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and
loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to
do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20.
We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a
garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released
our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.
And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well,
as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the
company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our
visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.
When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And
very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone,
and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a
few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down
- that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David
Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a
very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But
something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of
events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was
still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned
out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever
happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness
of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one
of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started
a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an
amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds
first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most
successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple
bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at
the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful
family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have
happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but
I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a
brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going
was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as
true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large
part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you
believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you
do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all
matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking
until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that
went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday
you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since
then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and
asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do
what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been
"No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is
the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices
in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all
fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to
die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to
lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with
cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on
my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this
was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should
expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go
home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It
means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10
years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is
buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to
say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day.
Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my
throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my
pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who
was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the
doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of
pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine
now.
This was the closest I've been to
facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having
lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when
death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who
want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the
destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should
be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is
Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now
the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become
the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste
it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with
the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions
drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow
your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to
become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing
publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the
bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far
from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This
was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it
was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of
like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was
idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several
issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its
course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.
On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning
country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so
adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."
It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin
anew, I wish that for you.
Thank you all very much
#2 –
Violent Acres’
For teaching
me that being depressed had nothing to do with the serotonin in my brain — the
reason I felt depressed was because my life sucked. I was
making choices just to appease the opinions of people around me, when I should
have been making choices to appease myself. This article helped me realize that
medication was not the solution to my joyless lifestyle — the true remedy was
to start making my own choices to live a more fulfilling life.
My Great Grandmother
was born in 1904 and immigrated to America with her family shortly thereafter.
When she turned 12, her Mother forced her to drop out of school and work twelve
hours a day in a tire factory so the family could pay the bills. When she
was 17, her family pressured her to marry a man she didn’t love in order to
gain financial security. Shortly after she said ‘I do,’ my Grandmother came to
her senses
and demanded a divorce.
Back then, divorce wasn’t
as common as it is now and her demand caused a lot of controversy in her
community. No one could understand why a woman wouldn’t want to be with the
nice man who wanted to provide for her and many dubbed her a strumpet. But my
Grandmother stood her ground and dissolved her marriage. However, upon returning
home, her family had decided in her absence that she must be crazy. Literally.
They had her forcibly committed to a mental institution.
Mental institutions were
not the nice, clean, white places of healing they are today. Instead, they were
filled to the brim with incompetent doctors who made snap diagnoses and ordered
experimental shock treatments. Patients often spent hours strapped down in beds
and force fed drugs that made them feel even worse. Some of them were raped,
beaten, or otherwise abused. After all, they were crazy. Who would believe
them?
My Grandmother told me
all of this for the first time shortly after my 19th birthday. I had recently
found out something pretty shocking about my past (Another story for another
day, don’t worry) and I went to her for confirmation because
there wasn’t anyone else I could trust to tell me the truth. She did
confirm what I had learned and apologized for her part in it. Destroyed by the
news, I confessed to her that I was thinking about going into therapy. My
desire for a Doctor to ‘fix me’ is what inspired her story.
When she was finished,
she said to me, “All the time I spent in that hellhole, people were constantly
trying to convince me that I felt sad because there was something wrong with my
brain. But do you want to know what I really learned?”
I leaned in closer,
absolutely absorbed by the image of my tough Grandmother who raised her
children, nurtured her (Second!) marriage, and was one of the first successful business
women of her era spending time in a mental institution. “What
Grandma?” I breathlessly inquired.
“I learned that I wasn’t
sad because there was something wrong with my brain. I learned that I was sad
because my life sucked.”
Initially, I laughed
because it was funny to hear my old Grandma use the word ‘sucked’ in a
sentence. But after that, I worriedly asked, “Are you saying I shouldn’t seek
therapy?”
“No,” she replied, “I’m
not saying that at all. What I am saying is that you should be wary of
the Doctor who tells you a pill is a fix for your broken mind. The way I see
it, you have a lot of reasons to be sad right now. So if that’s what you’re
feeling, that seems about right to me.”
Now that we live in a
culture where mental
illness is so incredibly popular that you’re almost considered
abnormal if you don’t have one, her words ring even truer. A lot of
people nowadays seem to think that any sign of anxiousness or sadness signifies
a broken brain, and immediately upon discovery will run with their asses on
fire for their prescription of Happy Pills.
“My brain doesn’t produce
enough serotonin!” they chirp. “This is why I’m always sad!”
It’s always the
serotonin. It’s never the lousy job or the loveless marriage or the helplessness
one feels when they finally realize they’ve been pressured into living a life
they would have never chosen for themselves. No, it’s never that. It’s always a
broken brain.
Now please don’t
misunderstand me here. I am not trying to lambaste psychiatric treatment nor am
I denying the existence of real, valid, medically proven mental disabilities. I
realize there are people out there who downright suffer from
hallucinations, irrational fears and compulsions, and crippling life
debilitating illnesses that wreak havoc on their lives if left untreated. I do
not fault these people for taking the drugs they need to feel better. In fact,
I applaud them.
It’s the people who try
to eradicate every hint of sadness and anger out of human existence I fault.
Negative emotions are a vital part of the human condition and it isn’t until we
experience them that we truly appreciate the positive opposites. In other
words, one needs sadness in their lives to be able to fully recognize happiness
when they come across it. Without anger, we can never appreciate the calm; our
hatred and indifference emphasis our love. To deprive oneself of any
emotion characteristic to our nature is to deny the very things that make us
human. Our minds work the way they do for a reason. They are not broken.
Modern day Americans are
often trapped in lousy, disappointing, soul crushing careers. If they are not
divorced already, their marriages are on the rocks. They live far outside of
their means, rack up thousands of dollars of debt, and then they work overtime
to pay for the toys they never have time to play with. They dedicate their
lives to pleasing
ungrateful children who won’t amount to much more than they did. Hours of their
downtime is spent in front of the television, switching from reality show to reality
show, because it is easier to watch other people live life than it is to live
their own. In a rare moment of creativity, they might write a secret out on a postcard and send it to a website
because they don’t have a single person in real life that they trust
enough to share their fears with. They feel all of this on top of the
usual human maladies of sickness, death and grief.
To be perfectly honest, I
would think it was weirder if most people didn’t entertain thoughts of
suicide.
The majority of people
aren’t sad because there is something wrong with their brain. They are sad
because their lives suck. But rather than admit that to themselves, they
run to the Doctor and beg for a diagnosis that alleviates their personal
responsibility in this regard. After all, if a man in a white coat tells you’re
broken, you never have to worry about fixing yourself. The sad reality is that
they’ll spend the rest of their lives switching medications and wondering why
nothing they take works and cures their disease. Never once do they consider
that the disease is their life and true healing will come once
attempts are made to repair it.
If you are sad right now,
I want you to consider that perhaps there is nothing wrong with you. Perhaps
you are seeing things the way they ought to be seen. Maybe there is just
something wrong with the world right now? Instead of popping some pills
in the hopes that they will put us on a perpetual even keel, maybe instead we
should figure out what is wrong with our society…and fix it.
#3 –
Steve Pavlina’s
For teaching
me that “to abandon a comfortable lifestyle that isn’t deeply fulfilling is to
abandon nothing.” Steve’s article helped me understand I was defending a comfortable
career without good reason. At the start of each workday, I was reluctant to
get out of bed. At the end of each workday, the amount of satisfaction I
received from the work I was doing was nil. Steve caused me to ask myself: Why
should I stay loyal to such a meaningless job?
Don’t Die
With Your Music Still In You!
you’re
sitting behind a desk working at a job you hate in order to protect your
current lifestyle, you are protecting nothing. Isn’t there a part of you, deep
inside, that wants to just walk away from all of that junk and start really
living? Can you feel how empty and hollow your days are, how devoid of meaning?
Have you forgotten what it’s like to really live a day that fulfills you deeply
as a human being? Look around your home at all your stuff. Recognize that in
the long run, it will all eventually end up as dust. None of it will endure.
It’s all temporary. Your house will eventually crumble. Your car will wind up
in a junkyard. You cannot permanently keep any of this stuff. Eventually you’re
going to lose it all. Or it will lose you.
So what kind
of life is that — one that’s dedicated to the guarding of dust? Is that what
you want your life to be about? If you feel there’s any purpose to your
existence as a human being, then is this it?
Life is just
too precious to waste. If you are spending your days working at a job that
isn’t deeply fulfilling to you, then you’re spending your days guarding dust.
There’s no real value there. Stuff cannot fulfill you. Ultimately it will only
distract you from living on purpose.
What does it
mean to really live? Deep down, you already have a sense of the direction where
this answer lies for you. Ultimately, it’s a choice. You’re totally free to
live the kind of life you want. But you’ll know you’re really living when you
would live pretty much the same way even if you knew you only had 18 months
left. If you would make some big changes in your life upon learning that you
only had 18 months to live, then why not make those changes now? Someone
reading this blog entry probably has less than 18 months to live. Maybe it’s
you.
Live for
what is real to you. Live for what truly matters to you.
What matters
to me — what is real to me — is inspiring and helping people. Directly or
indirectly, whenever I’m able to help someone solve a really tough problem or
to motivate someone to finally push past a big obstacle, that is something I
find tremendously fulfilling. And the fulfillment I get from doing this is so
great that it trumps all the external stuff. It doesn’t matter how much money I
make. It doesn’t matter if people reject my ideas or poke fun at what I enjoy
doing. This blog entry may be read by over 1000 people, but it may be such that
the ideas within are only able to help one person in a very small way. The
other 999 may conclude I’m nuts and unsubscribe. And that’s fine. It’s that one
person I’m writing for.
But at the
same time, starting from the point of spending each day doing something that
fulfills me, I’m building this work into a business that can support and
sustain me and my family. This will ultimately include paid speaking
engagements, and information products like books and audio programs. So I’m
starting with doing what I love and building it into a source of income. The
more money the business generates, the more people I’m ultimately able to
reach. So making money is aligned with my own personal fulfillment — they
aren’t at odds with each other. If you do what you love, then you can surely
find a way to turn it into an income stream — then the more money you make, the
more you expand your capacity to continue doing what you love in bigger and
bigger ways.
Taking what
you love to do and turning it into a source of income, either as an employee or
an entrepreneur, seems hard to resist. If you’re going to spend so much time
working to make money, why not make that money in the pursuit of your dreams
instead of in the protection of dust?
What does
your current to do list look like? Is it filled with tasks that aren’t even
real to you? Are you typing stuff that doesn’t matter, going to soulless
meetings, shuffling papers and filling out forms to appease computers, while
sitting in a Dilbert-style cage all day? Why do you continue to choose that
life each day? You’re always free to stop at any time. You make the rules.
What
percentage of the tasks on your to do list will fulfill you deeply to do them?
What kind of to do list would be real to you? What items might it contain?
Compose a new piece of music. Write something inspiring and share it with others.
Give your spouse a massage. Exercise. Play with your kids. Make a snowman in
Las Vegas (my wife did this one yesterday). Clear out some clutter. Read a
really great book. Audition for a local play. Start your own business. Tell
your boss, “Talk to the hand. I don’t do soulless work anymore.” Do something
that leaves you feeling at the end of the day that you really contributed the
best of yourself. Don’t die with your music still in you
#4 –
Brian Kim’s
For
emphasizing the importance of self-assessment. Brian made me take a good hard
look at myself and figure out what it is that makes me happiest. What’s more,
his article discusses how uncertainty and fear are the most common obstacles
preventing you from doing what you love to do. His solution involves
self-analysis: identify your skills and interests, then use your strengths to
live your passion. In Brian’s words, “conquer indecision and ACT, and you will
most definitely conquer all fear.”
How to Find
What You Love to Do!
This article was inspired by Steve
Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University. In it, he says the advice
we’ve all heard a thousand times:
“You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as
it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” -
Steve Jobs
Well then, the question naturally
arises:
How do you find what you love to do?
It’s such a big question.
What absolutely boils my blood
is that we hear we should be doing what we love to do all the time, but there’s
not any step by step advice out there on how to find what you love to
do. The advice that is out there helps to a certain degree, but it’s just a
bunch of pieces thrown together with no coherent logical structure or order.
A perfect example is this. In order to
find your passion, we are told to ask ourselves: “What would you do if you had
a million dollars (tax free)?”
The typical answer ensues: “Well gee,
I would put it in an account that yields high interest and live off the
interest each year. Then I would move to Hawaii, buy a house, sip margaritas
all day, play video games, go to the beach, swim, travel around the world,
taste all the cuisines, read the books, play the sports, and on and on and on.”
Does this really help? Not really.
Sure, you figured out what your lazy butt likes to do, but it doesn’t really
answer the question that’s hidden, which is “How do I make money doing
what I love to do?
What's the result? People working in
jobs they hate, feeling trapped because they can’t quit as they rely on that
sole source of income to finance a lifestyle tailored to escape their grim
reality, drifting aimlessly in life, in short, leading lives of quiet
desperation, as so eloquently put by Henry David Thoreau.
Why don’t they just quit their jobs
and pursue what they love to do you ask?
Two Reasons.
Reason #1: They don’t know what they love to do.
Reason #2: Fear. They’ve got a lifestyle to
uphold, bills to pay for, families to take care of, fear of no steady source of
income, fear of what other people might think or say about them, etc. Fear. Conquer
indecision in Reason #1 and ACT, and you will most definitely conquer all fear
in Reason #2.
The very fact that you are seeking to
find what you love to do (by the very fact you came across this article and
started reading it) is a BIG step believe it or not. Many people in their
lifetime avoid or do not even seek to find the answer to that question. They
hear the question in their head but have become extremely adept at silencing
it.
It is extremely important to answer
the question on how to find what you love to do.
You must decide what destination to
steer your life in. Otherwise, you leave yourself wide open for others to
direct your life, as well as at the mercy of the winds and storms of life. If
you know where your destination is, the rest is easy.
You will find once you know what you
want to do, all uncertainty and burden will be lifted off your shoulders and
you will have clear vision as to what your journey is and that journey will
truly be joyful.
By the time you finish reading this
article, I sincerely hope you experience that.
What about how to make money doing
what you love?
The question of how to monetize doing
what you love is certainly a valid one. There are bills to pay, stomachs to
feed, families to support, etc.
Don’t worry about that for now. That
will be covered later in this article.
First things first, you’ve got to find
what you love to do.
Why is it so hard to find what you
love to do?
The answer is:
It’s not hard at all.
You read right.
It’s not hard at all.
Then why are so many people having
difficulty finding what they love to do?
Because they’ve never truly asked
themselves.
What amazes me is that there seems to
be a stigma attached to spending time with oneself. You have to constantly be
doing something, whether it’s going to the game, drinking beer with the
buddies, going to that hot party or club downtown, etc. Don’t get me wrong,
there’s nothing wrong with doing all that, but I suspect the vast majority of
people who engage in this “I have to be doing something every minute because I
can’t be by myself” mentality are just putting up a front to show people how
satisfying and fulfilling their life is, when in reality, it’s just the
opposite. The irony here is that spending time with oneself is EXACTLY what you
should be doing to lead a satisfying and fulfilling life.
People think you have to travel around
the world, experience new things, etc to find what you love to do. No. You just
have to sit down and decide. The answer is already within you. You just have to
dig it up and avoid procrastinating. Your brain has absorbed all sorts of
information and experiences and it has the answer ready to be unraveled.
Just let it out.
Be honest. Have you actually sat down
by yourself with no distractions, with your sole focus on asking yourself what
you love to do without picking up your cell phone, surfing the net, watching
TV, chatting on AIM, listening to your favorite song, playing solitaire or
minesweeper, checking your email, returning a call, getting a drink of water,
going to the bathroom, looking at the clock, reading a magazine article, I
could go on and on but you get the point. I’m going to go out on a limb and say
you haven’t for the sole purpose of you reading this article. Why is that?
Fear of what the answer will be if you
ask yourself what you love to do.
The answer is: I don’t know.
But that is exactly why you MUST find
out. You’re avoiding the question because you know the answer is you don’t
know, but that’s ok. Admitting you don’t know is perfectly fine. There’s
nothing wrong with it. You’re way ahead of a ton of other people who learn to
quiet the voice within that asks the question of “What do I love to do?”
And let’s say you’re one of the few
people who actually specifically know what they love to do. The next thought
that pops in their head is “Oh, I can’t make any money off of that.” The seed
that was planted never grew.
I hate vague answers. I want clear,
logical, definitive answers to questions.
So let’s do this.
Step 1: You WILL find the answer. No
doubt.
You will find the answer. You will
find it. No doubt.
Approach the question with this
mentality and you are sure to find it. How long will it take? It doesn’t
matter. Bottom line, you will find the answer.
By doing this, you automatically
instill an anti quitting mechanism within yourself, because you know you will
find the answer. If you know what you want to do, then you will do it.
For example, if you know you
want to arrive in New York, you’ll find ways to get there. You’ll hop a train,
bus, or plane going to New York and will arrive in New York.
If you don’t have the cash, you’ll
borrow it, or get a job and save up, or get a job as a flight attendant to get
there for free. It doesn’t matter how long it will take or what you need to do
because you know you’re going to New York.
All your actions onward from the
decision that you want to arrive in New York will revolve around getting to New
York.
Read that last sentence again.
All your actions onward from the
decision that you want to arrive in New York will revolve around getting to New
York.
Finding what you love to do = Deciding
to arrive in New York.
Step 2: Make a list of your skills and
interests in two columns and WRITE THEM DOWN (I’ll explain why you must write
things down later):
I’ve taken the liberty of creating a
document you can print so you can easily fill in the blanks. You can download
it here. KEY is to
WRITE THESE DOWN!! I cannot emphasize this enough. Don’t think you can
do it all in your head. WRITE IT DOWN.
When I mean by skills is any skill. It
could be an intangible skill. Empty your clip here, list EVERY skill you have.
It could be programming, making web pages, talking, listening, persuading
people, typing, flirting, analyzing, giving speeches, making things easy to
understand, whistling, blowing bubbles with your spit, it could be anything.
Don’t be bashful. List everything you perceive your skills to be.
On your other column, lists your
interests and don’t be shy here as well. List EVERY interest you could possibly
think of. Spiders, shoes, hair, makeup, basketball, tennis, thinking of ideas,
babysitting, walking, hiking, fireworks, helping people, making fun of people,
fishing, tai chi, karate, seashells, seaweed, can openers, anything goes. Yes,
I did say can openers. Your interests can also include subjects you are
knowledgeable about as well. Computers, economics, biology, baskebtall plays,
football plays, magic tricks, etc.
To help you write down more interests,
think of what you were interested in at your previous jobs and write them down.
Also, think of what you were NOT interested in your previous jobs and write the
exact opposite.
Asking yourself the following
questions may shed light as to what skills and interests you possess.
If you went in a bookstore, which section
do you naturally gravitate toward?
Ask friends for any skills and
interests they see in you. You’ll be surprised at how much insight they have on
you that you’ve never thought of before.
What do you spend most of your time
doing? What do you look forward to doing? Go back and think of your
accomplishments as a child. What kind of skills and interests revolved around
your accomplishments?
What did people praise you on doing?
What did your teachers or parents say
you had a skill or knack of doing?
Why am I emphasizing skills and
interests here?
Skills: Because you’ve got to leverage what
you’re strong with. And don’t say you don’t have any. Everybody has skills.
You’ve just never sat down and thought about it and wrote it down. By using
your skills, you’ve got a head start, a catalyst.
Interests: Simply because you’ve got to love
what you do. By including interests, you include another form of an anti
quitting mechanism.
Focus on generating as many skills and
interests you can possibly think of and WRITE IT DOWN!
You may find that your skills are
gravitating toward one or two particular skills. The same may hold true for
interests. Keep that in mind for step 3.
Step 3: Set aside some TRUE alone time
with no distractions to focus and figure out what you love to do by asking
yourself the right questions.
It amazes me how people set aside time
for taxes, cooking, watching movies, reading, but when it comes to their own
personal future, they NEVER set aside any time. How much MORE time should you
set aside to figure out the path that will make you happy?
Ok, you’ve set some private alone time
with no distractions; now what?
You must ask yourself an extremely
clear question. Clarity is key here. The clearer the question, the easier the
answer will be.
For example, if I ask you what 12
times 12 is, the answer comes easily, 144.
However, if I ask, what is some even
two digit number times some other even two digit number? Guess how long it’ll
take you to answer that question?
Clear questions lead to clear answers.
Another key thing is to WRITE it down.
I know you’ve heard it a billion times and it’s so cliché but there’s a reason.
Writing things down allows you to easily make connections you’ve never thought
of before because you see it on paper. It also allows you to "free
room" in your brain for other thoughts because they are put in another
container so to speak.
If I ask you, what’s 257 times 852,
try doing that in your head vs. writing it down. When you write it down, the
answer comes out easier, not to mention more accurate.
If you haven’t already wrote down your
skills and interests in the previous step, STOP and DO IT NOW. It won’t do you
any good having them in your head.
So, let’s use your alone time to ask
yourself a clear question in writing. What is the question you should ask
yourself? Is it: “What do I love to do?”
That question is a bit broad, so let’s
narrow it down a little. Try asking yourself:
What would I love to do on a daily
basis utilizing both my skills and interests that will add significant value to
people?
See the difference here? The more
detailed and clearer the question, the easier it is to answer it. Why did I add
the add value part? Because that will lead you to find a way to make money
doing what you love.
By incorporating the question of how
to add significant value by utilizing your skills, you automatically filter out
all the “common answers” that people come up with when asked what they love to
do. Common answers such as: “I love to watch TV.” Or “I love to play video
games.” Answers such as that discourage people because they see no way of
making money from it.
Adding to that, many people tend to
make the mistake of focusing on how to make money. A lot of people fail to
realize that money is just a byproduct of adding value in the form of a
product or service to people.
When you know how you can add value to
people, you’ll know how to get money.
Open up Word or get out a blank sheet
of paper and write that question up at the top. Here it is again in case you don't
want to scroll up.
What would I love to do on a daily
basis utilizing both my skills and interests that will add significant value to
people?
The KEY is to WRITE YOUR ANSWERS
DOWN!! I cannot emphasize this enough. Don’t think you can do it all in your
head. WRITE IT DOWN.
Looking at the two column list you
made in the previous step, start writing down a list of answers. Just write. It
doesn’t have to be perfect and it doesn’t have to make sense because sooner or
later, you will connect the dots. Here’s a story to illustrate what I’m talking
about.
There was a story about a small town
with a ski resort which attracted a lot of tourists, which in turn helped the
town’s economy. However, when it snowed, the snowfall collected on the power
cables, until the weight was enough to collapse the cables, resulting in
several power outages. Slowly but surely, tourists stopped coming, so the town
held a meeting to discuss how to solve the problem of having snow collect on
the power cables. Solutions were tossed out for quite some time.
Then somebody shouted in a loud voice
from the back of the room and said “Let’s hang pots of honey on the power
cables to make the bears climb up. When the bears climb up and get the honey,
their movement will shake the snow off the power cables.”
The audience laughed and somebody else
deciding to play along said “How will we refill the pots of honey?” “We’ll use
a helicopter”, another person said.
Then the answer dawned upon them. By
having a helicopter fly by the power lines, the wind from the propellers would
shake the snow off.
The main point here is that answers,
no matter how ridiculous they may seem, should not be feared because more often
than not, they lead to results. It’s all part of the process.
Even if an answer seems ludicrous,
write it down. Write down all your answers. Do it until you have 20 answers and
look them over. You will find that as you write down answers and look at them,
it will in turn propel you to think of new creative answers that you would not
have come up with before.
You will be amazed at all the things
you wrote and the different solid creative ideas that come about.
Now the time comes for focus.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the sun and
magnifying glass analogy pertaining to focus but I’m going to say it again. If
you try to do a bunch of things at once, nothing will get done. If you wave a
magnifying glass around on the hottest day, you won’t burn anything. You’ll
dissipate all your energy among the trivial many.
By focusing and harnessing all your
power, energy, time, focus, thinking, etc. on one goal, you will be amazed at
how deep and quickly you can accomplish that. Just as you steady a magnifying
glass on a single object, with the hot burning sun rays analogous to your
desire, focus, power, energy, time, etc, you will make an impact.
The notion of focus is so important
that I’m going to use another analogy. Imagine you’re a cheetah and you see two
juicy gazelles grazing in the grass. Spending your time chasing both = no food
= death. Hunt one down. It might take time to catch it and kill it, but when
you do, you'll be recharged. You will soon start collecting information on how
the gazelles run, which direction they run, where they like to graze, etc,
which will help you catch more gazelles in the future, thereby putting you in a
favorable cycle. Case in point, focus on one.
So look over your list you just made
and choose one idea that seems the most appealing to you. You may find you can
combine a few ideas into one idea. Nevertheless, choose one idea that you will
garner the greatest satisfaction not just for yourself, but to other people.
You might want to zero in on the ideas
that combine your skills and interests that you’ve listed in the
beginning. The reason being, psychologically speaking, you’ve probably
listed your greatest skills and interests first and then as you started listing
them downward, so did your degree of skill and interest. This might not be
true. You might have 20 different but equal skills and interests, which if you do,
I congratulate you. Just a tip I thought I would throw out.
How Will You Know You’ve Found What
You Love To Do?
Does it make you feel good? If you
feel it in your gut that you’ve hit the jackpot, you’re right.
If your friend were to bring up the
idea you picked, would you be all over it talking about it?
You have to have no reservations about
it. If you feel the slightest doubt that it’s not your passion, then it’s not.
You must hunger to overcome any obstacles to pursue your passion.
Once you have that, your search is
over.
That, right there is what you love to
do.
As for how to make money off of it,
you might have already found ways when you wrote down your answers. If you
still want to find more ways to make money doing what you love, just follow the
same steps.
Step 1: Know you will find the answer.
Step 2: Write a clear question, write
down the answers, and you will be amazed at the many ways you can make money
from it.
I’ll leave the money making question
up to you, but it shouldn’t be hard to do.
Now that you know what you love to do
and how to make money from it, you must ACT.
That’s a
whole other story. Most people get to this stage but don’t act and it doesn’t
make any difference in their lives.
#5 –
Fred Gratzon’s
For helping
me understand that the reason I’m reluctant to get a job is because I’d rather
be the boss, president, or sole proprietor of my own creation. Thanks to Fred’s
article, I was able to see the entrepreneur in me: I’m always looking for a way
for things to be simplified, made more efficient, or automated by a computer.
There’s a reason I feel this way — and it’s for the same reason that I don’t
want to have to answer to someone else.
Top 10 Signs
You’re Made to be an Entrepreneur!
10. You are unemployable. You can’t hold
a job. You don’t want to hold a job. And you react to getting a job the same
way a cat reacts when you try to give it a bath.
9. You are anti-authoritarian. You
can’t fathom the thought of being anything less than Boss, President, Chairman,
Don, and/or Emperor.
8. You have the uncanny ability to get
other people to do all the work.
7. You are always looking for and/or
seeing economic opportunity everywhere and in everything. While at a concert,
you occupy yourself by estimating the evening’s take and its gross margins
instead of listening to the music.
6. You spend more time and energy
looking for easier, faster, cheaper, more effective ways of accomplishing
something than if you just did the task outright.
5. You would
enthusiastically trade a life-time pass to Disneyland for one ride in the Vomit
Comet. In other words, you would give up a secure, even-keeled, bland existence
for a life that whipsaws uncontrollably between exhilaration and terror.
4. You don’t see lack of money, lack
of knowledge, and lack of experience as barriers to entry. You are also not
deterred by the existence of formidable competition.
3. You favor multiplication over
addition and you lull yourself to sleep by calculating price-earnings ratios.
2. You would happily invest your home’s
equity and your life savings (and your mother’s life savings) in your start-up.
And the
Number One sign you are made to be an entrepreneur . . .
1. When you
project future earnings, your spread sheet shows that by Year 5, you can buy
Argentina and sell it to Brazil.
#6 –
Steve Pavlina’s 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
For teaching
me that working for other people is stupid. Self-employment using passive
income is the best way to earn money without trading away life’s freedoms. In
other words, Steve helped me understand it’s possible to be “Happily Jobless.”
10 Reasons
You Should Never Get a Job!
Here are some
reasons you should do everything in your power to avoid getting a job:
1. Income for dummies.
Getting a
job and trading your time for money may seem like a good idea.
There’s only one problem with it. It’s stupid! It’s the stupidest
way you can possibly generate income! This is truly income
for dummies.
Why is
getting a job so dumb? Because you only get paid when you’re
working. Don’t you see a problem with that, or have you been so
thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s reasonable and intelligent to only
earn income when you’re working? Have you never considered that it
might be better to be paid even when you’re not working? Who taught
you that you could only earn income while working? Some other brainwashed
employee perhaps?
Don’t you
think your life would be much easier if you got paid while you were eating,
sleeping, and playing with the kids too? Why not get paid 24/7? Get
paid whether you work or not. Don’t your plants grow even when you aren’t
tending to them? Why not your bank account?
Who cares
how many hours you work? Only a handful of people on this entire planet
care how much time you spend at the office. Most of us won’t even notice
whether you work 6 hours a week or 60. But if you have something of value
to provide that matters to us, a number of us will be happy to pull
out our wallets and pay you for it. We don’t care about your time —
we only care enough to pay for the value we receive. Do you really care
how long it took me to write this article? Would you pay me twice as much
if it took me 6 hours vs. only 3?
Non-dummies
often start out on the traditional income for dummies path. So
don’t feel bad if you’re just now realizing you’ve been
suckered. Non-dummies eventually realize that trading time for money
is indeed extremely dumb and that there must be a better way. And of
course there is a better way. The key is to de-couple your
value from your time.
Smart
people build systems that generate income 24/7, especially passive
income. This can include starting a business, building a web site,
becoming an investor, or generating royalty income from creative work.
The system delivers the ongoing value to people and generates income from it,
and once it’s in motion, it runs continuously whether you tend to it or not.
From that moment on, the bulk of your time can be invested in increasing your
income (by refining your system or spawning new ones) instead of merely
maintaining your income.
This web
site is an example of such a system. At the time of this writing, it generates
about $9000 a month in income for me (update: $40,000 a month as of
10/31/06), and it isn’t my only income stream either. I write each
article just once (fixed time investment), and people can extract value from
them year after year. The web server delivers the value, and other
systems (most of which I didn’t even build and don’t even understand) collect
income and deposit it automatically into my bank account. It’s not
perfectly passive, but I love writing and would do it for free anyway.
But of course it cost me a lot of money to launch this business, right?
Um, yeah, $9 is an awful lot these days (to register the domain name).
Everything after that was profit.
Sure it
takes some upfront time and effort to design and implement your own
income-generating systems. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel —
feel free to use existing systems like ad networks and affiliate
programs. Once you get going, you won’t have to work so many hours
to support yourself. Wouldn’t it be nice to be out having dinner with
your spouse, knowing that while you’re eating, you’re earning money? If
you want to keep working long hours because you enjoy it, go right ahead.
If you want to sit around doing nothing, feel free. As long as your
system continues delivering value to others, you’ll keep getting paid whether
you’re working or not.
Your local
bookstore is filled with books containing workable systems others
have already designed, tested, and debugged. Nobody is born knowing how
to start a business or generate investment income, but you can easily learn
it. How long it takes you to figure it out is irrelevant
because the time is going to pass anyway. You might as well emerge at
some future point as the owner of income-generating systems as opposed to a
lifelong wage slave. This isn’t all or nothing. If your
system only generates a few hundred dollars a month, that’s a significant step
in the right direction.
2. Limited experience.
You might
think it’s important to get a job to gain experience. But that’s like
saying you should play golf to get experience playing golf. You gain
experience from living, regardless of whether you have a job or not. A
job only gives you experience at that job, but
you gain ”experience” doing just about anything, so that’s no real
benefit at all. Sit around doing nothing for a couple years,
and you can call yourself an experienced meditator, philosopher, or
politician.
The problem
with getting experience from a job is that you usually just repeat the
same limited experience over and over. You learn a lot in the beginning
and then stagnate. This forces you to miss other experiences that
would be much more valuable. And if your limited skill set ever becomes
obsolete, then your experience won’t be worth squat. In fact, ask
yourself what the experience you’re gaining right now will be worth in 20-30
years. Will your job even exist then?
Consider
this. Which experience would you rather gain? The knowledge of how
to do a specific job really well — one that you can only monetize by
trading your time for money – or the knowledge of how to enjoy financial
abundance for the rest of your life without ever needing a job again? Now
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the latter experience. That
seems a lot more useful in the real world, wouldn’t you say?
3. Lifelong domestication.
Getting a
job is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You
learn how to be a good pet.
Look around
you. Really look. What do you see? Are these the surroundings
of a free human being? Or are you living in a cage for unconscious
animals? Have you fallen in love with the color beige?
How’s your
obedience training coming along? Does your master reward your
good behavior? Do you get disciplined if you fail to obey your
master’s commands?
Is there any
spark of free will left inside you? Or has your conditioning made you a
pet for life?
Humans are
not meant to be raised in cages. You poor thing…
4. Too many mouths to feed.
Employee
income is the most heavily taxed there is. In the USA you can expect that
about half your salary will go to taxes. The tax system is designed to
disguise how much you’re really giving up because some of those taxes are
paid by your employer, and some are deducted from your paycheck. But you
can bet that from your employer’s perspective, all of those taxes are
considered part of your pay, as well as any other compensation you receive such
as benefits. Even the rent for the office space you consume is
considered, so you must generate that much more value to cover
it. You might feel supported by your corporate environment, but
keep in mind that you’re the one paying for it.
Another
chunk of your income goes to owners and investors. That’s a lot
of mouths to feed.
It isn’t
hard to understand why employees pay the most in taxes relative to their
income. After all, who has more control over the tax system?
Business owners and investors or employees?
You only get
paid a fraction of the real value you generate. Your real salary may be
more than triple what you’re paid, but most of that money you’ll never
see. It goes straight into other people’s pockets.
What a
generous person you are!
5. Way too risky.
Many
employees believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support
themselves.
Morons.
Social conditioning
is amazing. It’s so good it can even make people believe the
exact opposite of the truth.
Does putting
yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by
saying two words (“You’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to
you? Does having only one income stream honestly sound more secure than
having 10?
The idea
that a job is the most secure way to generate income is just silly. You
can’t have security if you don’t have control, and employees have the least control
of anyone. If you’re an employee, then your real job title should be professional
gambler.
6. Having an evil bovine master.
When you run
into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head
the other way. When you run into an idiot in the corporate
world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.”
Did you know
that the word boss comes from the Dutch word baas, which historically
means master? Another meaning of the word boss is
“a cow or bovine.” And in many video games, the boss is the evil
dude that you have to kill at the end of a level.
So if your
boss is really your evil bovine master, then what does that make
you? Nothing but a turd in the herd.
Who’s your
daddy?
7. Begging for money.
When you
want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master
for more money? Does it feel good to be thrown some
extra Scooby Snacks now and then?
Or are you
free to decide how much you get paid without needing anyone’s permission but
your own?
If you have
a business and one customer says “no” to you, you simply say “next.”
8. An inbred social life.
Many people
treat their jobs as their primary social outlet. They hang out with the
same people working in the same field. Such incestuous relations are
social dead ends. An exciting day includes deep conversations
about the company’s switch from Sparkletts to Arrowhead, the delay of
Microsoft’s latest operating system, and the unexpected delivery of more Bic
pens. Consider what it would be like to go outside and talk to
strangers. Ooooh… scary! Better stay inside where it’s safe.
If one of
your co-slaves gets sold to another master, do you lose a friend? If
you work in a male-dominated field, does that mean you never get to talk to
women above the rank of receptionist? Why not decide for yourself whom to
socialize with instead of letting your master decide for you?
Believe it or not, there are locations on this planet where free people
congregate. Just be wary of those jobless folk — they’re a crazy bunch!
9. Loss of freedom.
It takes a
lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee. The first thing you
have to do is break the human’s independent will. A good way to do this
is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules
and regulations. This leads the new employee to
become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at
any minute for something incomprehensible. Thus, the employee will
likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without
question. Stir in some office politics for good measure, and we’ve
got a freshly minted mind slave.
As part of
their obedience training, employees must be taught how to dress, talk,
move, and so on. We can’t very well have employees thinking for
themselves, now can we? That would ruin everything.
God forbid
you should put a plant on your desk when it’s against the company policy.
Oh no, it’s the end of the world! Cindy has a plant on her desk!
Summon the enforcers! Send Cindy back for another round of sterility
training!
Free human
beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course. The only
policy they need is: “Be smart. Be nice. Do what you
love. Have fun.”
10. Becoming a coward.
Have you
noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine
about problems at their companies? But they don’t really want solutions
– they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s all someone
else’s fault. It’s as if getting a job somehow drains all the free will
out of people and turns them into spineless cowards. If you can’t
call your boss a jerk now and then without fear of getting fired, you’re
no longer free. You’ve become your master’s property.
When you
work around cowards all day long, don’t you think it’s going to rub off on
you? Of course it will. It’s only a matter of time before
you sacrifice the noblest parts of your humanity on the altar of
fear: first courage… then honesty… then honor and integrity… and
finally your independent will. You sold your humanity for
nothing but an illusion. And now your greatest fear is
discovering the truth of what you’ve become.
I don’t care
how badly you’ve been beaten down. It is never too late to
regain your courage. Never!
THANK
YOU!
#
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