Find Your Calling: 5 Steps to Identify Your Purpose. “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.” ~Rumi When I was young, I fell in love with Africa. It was an unsophisticated and amorphous love, not directly related to anything in particular about that vast continent. I now see that the point of my love affair with Africa was to deliver my first calling to me. Merriam-Webster defines a “calling” as: “…a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action especially when accompanied by conviction of divine influence.” My first calling was to connect with people who seemed very different from me. As with most callings, mine gave me a way to bring more love to the world. My first calling taught me that empathy heals and nourishes all those it touches, and that I could spread love by simply being available to hear another person, whoever they are. Just because we have callings doesn’t mean they’re easy to follow.
It was hard to understand what the calling was when it first began to whisper in my ear. 1. Get Started on Your Dream: Clear the 5 Most Daunting Hurdles. “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” ~Buddha A decade or so ago, when I was 20, I was supposed to settle into an “arranged marriage,” a common concept in India. I would never have known what it means to be financially independent, to go after my passions, and to be true to myself. Until then, I had only wished to have a career—to go to a big city, live independently, and explore my identity. But those were merely daydreams. Though I had accepted that reality, I wasn’t at peace with it. It was only prudent that I brush the dream under the carpet, because, even if I tried, it seemed unlikely.
I realized this might have been my only chance to shape my life as I visualized it. I wondered, “What would happen if I put every single grain of my brain, my heart, my soul, my blood, and my bones into this one dream?” Today, I am so proud of myself that I dared to make that attempt, against all odds. Being Aware 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 7 Secrets of High-Energy People: More Strategies. More Strategies 5. Keep your flywheel spinning. People always talk about finding a passion, but something that exalted can end up being more draining than energizing. That's why I talk about flywheels, mechanical devices that store energy, then give it back to you as needed. High-energy people always have a flywheel -- an interest they connect with, no matter how eccentric. For Leslie, 29, that flywheel is collecting antique recipes. If you don't have a flywheel, find one. 6. Say you've been thinking about cutting your hair short. 7. Emotional energy has a kind of magical quality: The more you give, the more you get back.
But you have to take specific action. After all, if it's true that what goes around comes around, why not make sure that what's circulating around you is the good stuff? From the book, The Emotional Energy Factor: The Secrets High-Energy People Use to Beat Emotional Fatigue. How to Do What You Love. January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love. " But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. Bounds Notes. How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love. “Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness, “and dedicate your life to it.”
But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn’t by luck. I myself am a firm believer in the power of curiosity and choice as the engine of fulfillment, but precisely how you arrive at your true calling is an intricate and highly individual dance of discovery. Still, there are certain factors — certain choices — that make it easier. Every few months, I rediscover and redevour Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham’s fantastic 2006 article, How to Do What You Love.
What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. More of Graham’s wisdom on how to find meaning and make wealth can be found in Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. Alain de Botton, modern philosopher and creator of the “literary self-help genre”, is a keen observer of the paradoxes and delusions of our cultural conceits. 7,532 Jobs worldwide. 8 Cues for Developing Passion.