Dear Aidan,
Currently I am in a dead end, low paying job that I am very unhappy at. I want to have a successful fantastic career, but I don’t know where to start! I know that I need to have a plan mapped out so I can have a plan to know where I am going! I don’t know that either. Everytime I think about my career I get more and more upset and I am not sure what to do!
Dear Working Gurl,
First of all you are doing WAY BETTER than you think! I am sorry that you feel uncomfortable, but actually you should feel pretty good about the fact that you have desires to want to head in the direction of success! A lot of people have just simply given in to the dissatisfying mediocrity that is life and the fact that you have this strong desire to move toward what you want means that you are ALIVE and WELL and NOT SETTLING! You could in contrast: just eat Cheetos all day and decide that you ought to be “happy with what you got” HELL NO YOU WON’T GO so good work in regards to that!
Okay now – let’s talk about success and what that means to you. To me, success means doing what you LOVE DOING and making LOTS OF MONEY at it. I would not consider it a success for me to be making millions of dollars doing say… I don’t know… accounting. I am unusually gifted with numbers but ugh to sit at a computer all day adding subtracting would drive me absolutely bananas. I mean I love bananas but too much of a good thing.. well.. nevermind.
So since you are at the beginning stages, it’s easy to watch say… “Shark Tank” and see successful people and try to emulate their success but trying to copy what they have created in their environment. The problem with doing that is that they are different from you!
It’s like this: Say I really respect Mark Cuban. He seems happy and he is married to a woman so I will just go marry a woman and live with her even though I am gay. Boy. Would that be a sexless marriage or what?! You might think that is an exaggeration but it is TRUE!
Do you think that the people on that reality tv show about tattoos would be as successful as they are if they decided that they wanted to be successful so they tried to emulate their life around being just like Suzanne Somers and sell Thighmasters? NO!
My advice to you is this: Success will come as you follow the things you are most interested in and start paving a path in that direction vs looking at other people’s successes, or even successes that you have DECIDED is the right path for you and then starting that journey. Do you see the difference? One is more focused on YOUR interest, YOUR experience and YOUR JOURNEY. The other is more focused on the END GOAL.
WE NEVER GET TO THE END GOAL people! WE ALL DIE! So truly. I could kill myself to be a surgeon and make lots of money, but at the end of the day, that surgeons license means NOTHING because you can’t die with it! So, pick something that you have an interest in and move in that direction! You might bounce around for a while as you explore the things that bring you the most amount of joy, but once you find that thing you LOVE you will know it, and it will be easy to navigate yourself ONE STEP AT A TIME. You can have a grand plan.. but truly.. I mean.. how many of THOSE have you see actually workout throughout someone’s lifetime?
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