Stop Thinking and Start Trying…

I’ve sat in a corporate desk job for just over five years. It’s been ok. Sometimes I have hated it and sometimes I think I have quite liked it. I’ve got to the age of 27 and I have found myself at a crossroads — a mental one whereby my consciousness has finally caught up with what I have been doing and I’ve realised it is not right for me. I don’t enjoy it, I am not mentally engaged and my infant enthusiasm that naturally seeps out of anyone in a ‘first’ job post-University has completely worn off. What has created a smokescreen over an obvious lack of fulfilment is that I am pretty good at it, or at least I am good enough at acting to fool myself, and others, that I am pretty good at it. I have been promoted six times in five years, I have been sent abroad for a year by the company, and I have been ‘ear-marked’ as a future leader and lots of junior colleagues and graduates have asked me to be their mentor. That smokescreen was thick, but I have gradually been able to see through it.

Over the last 18 months I have desperately tried to work out what it is that makes me passionate. I have read what feels like everything on the subject of trying to work out what you want to do, finding your passion, attaining job fulfilment etc. I have thought for a long time about starting up a business, I have had plenty of ideas, pursued them and then dropped them simply because they didn’t excite me enough. I have tried techniques and tasks forcing me to do things, such as, thinking about what I enjoyed when I was a child or thinking about a time I have been completely obsessed with a topic and forgotten to eat. None of course achieving the light-bulb moment of which they all promised. I have spoken to lots of people — friends, close colleagues and even a former life coach (point to note here that this was actually my Mother). I twisted myself into an anxious paralysis. I felt pathetic. How did I not know what I was passionate about? How did I now know what excited me?

We have all seen and met people who just know what they are doing and why they are doing it. Those people who know what they are fighting for day in day out. Those people who feel the tangible difference of their work and those people who simply know, with real clarity, what motivates them. Of those people I am utterly impressed and wildly jealous. My girlfriend just happens to be one of those people. She is a Science Teacher, and from what I can tell, she is a brilliant one. But it is not simply teaching that drives her every day. She has a fundamental belief and an almost aggressive passion in educational equality, and everything she does ladders up to pushing a bit closer towards that. Every career decision (and a lot of non-career decisions) are judged via that lens. The right decision is the one that enables her to have a bigger impact on educational equality. It’s as simple as that. A few people have commented to me in the past that they see this as a bit restrictive. ‘Doesn’t that mean she always has to be a teacher?’ they ask. No it doesn’t, it’s the opposite. It is an enabler. Of course she can learn a huge amount and have a big impact on educational equality from being a teacher. But she could also set something up herself or work for a charity that pushes society to wake up about educational injustice, or she could become a Governmental Advisor on the topic for instance — completely different jobs and there are hundreds of more things she could do that fall under that focus, that lens and ultimately her purpose.

There are plenty of people like this and they have found what it is that motivates them and what they are most passionate about and they have found it quickly. For most other people however, like me, the search continues.

One exercise which I did find helpful and something I urge anyone to do was the 10,5,3,1 exercise. Catchy name. You put your name in the middle of a big piece of A3 paper and under it you write what your age will be in ten years. And then you start to craft what your ideal lifestyle would be like in ten years. Do not think about career here, focus on lifestyle and be specific. Answer detailed sort of questions and build a spider diagram. Questions such as; what sort of place to you want to live? What sort of house? Big? Small? Is there a garden? Are there kids around? If so, how many? Pets? Is the house in the country? Do you have an office? What do you do day to day? What are your hobbies? What sort of friends do you have? What’s your commute like? How many people do you work with? Ask yourself anything, and gradually build your ideal lifestyle. Make this ideal, don’t compromise. If you want 10 acres, write that down. If you want a penthouse flat in London as well as a country house, get that down. If you want to wear shorts into the office, write that too. Create this lifestyle, and spend time doing it and thinking about it. When I did this section of the exercise it took me about 2 weeks. I started it and then I would think about it when I was at work and when I got home I would add to it. Keep building it. I would also suggest if you are in a serious relationship, I would ask your other half to do the exercise too. However, it is integral you do this separately do not compare notes until the end as you will start compromising your ideal. Once you are happy with this rough lifestyle take a step back and see what pops out — what is the link between all you have written down, what jumps out to you that needs to change from the path you are on now? For example when I did it, the word variety really popped out. In ten years, I wanted to be meeting lots of different people every week, I wanted to be learning a lot of new things, I wanted to have lots of options and opportunities, even the house I wanted had variety and was a bit different. This hit me quite hard, as what I was doing and had been doing was the opposite of variety. But the key here is to carry on with the exercise. See that lifestyle in ten years, then write a smaller one for five years from now. As in — if I want to have that lifestyle in ten years, what do I need to be doing at the five year point? Then you do an even smaller spider diagram for three months asking yourself — if I want to be there in five years, what do I need to be doing in three months’ time? And then, you guessed it, you ask yourself, what do you have to do in one day (aka tomorrow) to get to where you want to be in three months? And for me, on a three months’ notice period. This meant quitting my job.

The point and key learning of doing this is shifting focus from career to lifestyle, and although what you want to do with your life doesn’t jump out of the page, what does jump out of the page is the things you need to change to get to the lifestyle you want. It also urges action — which as I will come onto is the lifeblood for getting yourself sorted.

So I am currently serving my notice period. I’ve got another job for a smaller, hopefully more dynamic company. It is a Branding Agency (I know I enjoy the more strategic/creative thinking in my current marketing job) working with a lot of different clients, in lots of different countries, to hopefully allow me to try out that variety of which I crave. I don’t know if it is exactly what I want to do nor do I know if it’s going to give me the fulfilment I seek. But I am really excited about its potential and I know what I am doing now is not what I want to do and I know it does not give me fulfilment. And knowing that is enough for action. It is enough for change. And it should be enough for you too.

What I think I have learnt over the last couple of years of thinking about, searching for, longing for and yearning for my passion just to come to me is that the searching, longing, yearning and thinking is ironically the same thing that is holding me back from finding it. You just cannot think your way to what you want to do. You cannot just write all your ideas down, your interests, what you are good at, what inspires you, what you enjoyed doing as a child, what you enjoy as hobbies now, you cannot read all the hundreds of books, columns, articles and blogs written on the topic and you cannot simply work through all the tasks, techniques, methods and processes that ‘experts’ promise will help. You cannot do all these things and expect any sort of concrete answer to just jump out. Why? You have to TRY rather than THINK. If you are making decisions to not pursue opportunities simply based on thinking, then you are making the wrong decisions and you are missing opportunities that you don’t even know about. You have to actually try and do the stuff that might be interesting to you, that you might be good at, that you might enjoy, that you might get passionate about and that you might get fulfilment from. And you know what, if you try it, you realise it’s not ticking those boxes. Try something else. Or if you are like me and seek variety, try multiple things at once!

And after all that trying stuff how do you know when you find ‘it’? Well, firstly. I don’t know, because I haven’t found ‘it’. But I think the whole, bigger point here which I will hopefully write about in more detail soon is you don’t find ‘it’. There could be no such thing as ‘it’. I think you will be working on a project, for a cause, or in a new job that you will begin to just feel a bit different about, or maybe that you start to feel a bit obsessive about and you gain a desire to put every ounce of effort towards. I may be wrong here but it’s probably not a light-bulb moment. I guarantee, like anything good, it takes time and it takes work to find something you can get passionate about. But just stop worrying about that right now — it’s that worry that will start to see you closing doors through over-thinking versus opening doors through action. Don’t worry about the end game too much, don’t worry about the consequences. As the worst thing you can do is stay in whatever you’re doing that you know you don’t particularly like and just wait until that thought, that idea, that business plan, that career choice just morphs itself into your perfect plan. You cannot THINK your way to doing something that you love. You just need to try something that over time could lead to it. BUT YOU WON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS UNTIL YOU TRY STUFF. So stop thinking, stop analysing, stop talking, stop worrying and just act.

This was Jamie’s first blog post and was originally published at https://jamieholtum.ghost.io/