I watched Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech (above), and heard this fantastic quote:
“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.” - Steve Jobs
It got me thinking.
Despite the fact that largely I am very happy with my life, in some ways, I still ultimately feel I am stagnating. I’m not sure if I have an undiagnosed case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), or I am just restless; but I struggle to spend too much time in one place, doing one thing. Maybe that’s why I love to travel, and maybe why I am constantly searching for new experiences, learning new things, and exploring new ideas. Even in my career, working as a contractor, never too long in one place, always on the move, new people and new places every few months.
Having more or less fallen in to my current Technical Support career path due to my inability at high school to commit to anything else, I feel the time has come for a change. Perhaps drastic change.
Working intermittently as both Technical Support and a Project Engineer definitely had its highlights; I’ve met a lot of interesting people, found well paying work quickly and easily when emigrating to the United Kingdom, and gained an understanding of computers that undoubtedly qualify me as a total geek.
But where do I go from here? I’m no longer in love with technology, at least not in a support capacity; I want to do something interesting, more challenging, something that I am passionate about. I want to be excited when I wake up in the morning, not unenthused, bored and depressed.
I look at the bland uninteresting lives of the people around me and am petrified at the thought that I could be like them; middle-aged, balding, working a mundane job I hate. This may be fine for them, they might even like it, but it’s not for me, and I refuse to lower the bar of what is acceptable in my life. I don’t just want to tolerate my life; I want to love it.
Recognising my predicament, the first step seemed to be finding work I was more interested in. Having a lot of experience in the Project sector, Project Management seemed the next logical step; so I went out and got my Prince2 Practitioner certification. Six months after obtaining the qualification, while I still think Project Management would be more interesting, and definitely more challenging; I don’t think it’s my passion in life, it’s a conservative step, I need to think bigger.
While travelling through some rural parts of Cambodia, I couldn’t help but notice how joyful people were, despite the fact they had nothing and lived in bamboo huts; I found this an startling contrast compared to the discontent and misery of the comparatively rich I see everyday in the UK. This epiphany got me thinking; maybe my quest for happiness is misled. Maybe a secure job and a pension plan weren’t going to provide me with the fulfilment all humans are ultimately seeking. Furthermore, despite my adolescent dreams of big yachts, fast cars and owning pacific islands, maybe material assets and expensive toys are not going to make me happy either, maybe no amount of money could provide me with what I was after.
It became apparent, I should seek happiness first, and wealth second. While I still would like my own Pacific island, I can appreciate that should not be a goal by itself, but a by-product of reaching my goals. Fortunately, wealth and happiness are not mutually exclusive, in fact I would suspect money made more people happy than poverty ever did, but I believe it should be a secondary objective. I would choose to be happy and poor, rather than rich and miserable; but ultimately I want both.
So how does one go about creating a life they love? To be honest, I’m not sure. The advice you hear most often is to find something you love, and then pursue that with all your energies. But for me, at 22 years of age, I haven’t quite figured what my passions in life are. According to Steve in the video, you can only connect the dots looking back; so with that in mind, my goal for the next few months is to explore my fringe interests and see what I can find, maybe those dots will connect up and I can find something I really want to sink my teeth in to.
