In Life, do what makes sense…NOT what you love…Well, KINDA

I read a blog post on “medium” lately, that inspired this post…In part. It was one of those slightly annoying and disorienting articles one reads that said, do not pick a career based on what you love doing, pick a career based on what you are good at. I find articles like this disorienting because my generation was brought up on the crazy idea that you can and SHOULD love what you do. Haven pursued that idea for most of my adult life, I consider it an affront when it is suggested that I have been foolish and reckless,.. and ought to reconsider my position :).

… However, blog posts like the one described above might be on to something, although to be sure, the thesis could do with further development or clarification. Unfortunately, what we generally hear when we read these articles is, do not do what you love because you may not be very good at it. There is no correlation between success and how much you love something, there IS correlation between success and how good you are at something. Therefore if misery must be endured for the sake of gain, then so be it, and who are we to expect better?

I believe the more helpful way to think about it is this. When in the process of searching for a career, it is far more efficient and far less heart wrenching to base your search on what you are good at, and what you think you could be good at, and then once you have established that, explore that shortlist in whatever ways, to see which career choice you can fall in love with.

The thought is simple: Good decisions they say, are made when your heart lines up with your head. We tend to do the opposite and try to line up our heads with our hearts, which is far more difficult, because hearts are….fickle, they say a thousand different things on a given day and are generally less stable than the weather. That lack of peace that we often get with a decision we have made, is often because we are hitching our mind to a horse that it knows will not go very far, fooling ourselves into believing something, although all the signs, good sense, prior experience and the wise people in our lives say differently. Conversely, the sense of peace that comes with a good decision, career or otherwise, emanates from a place of deep satisfaction, because we are genuinely enthused or excited by what we are about to undertake, and our brains aren’t calling “foul”.

More and more I find this theme to be true in other areas of my life. I find that I’m making better decisions now, because I’m more comfortable with doing the “obvious thing”. That’s an expression a friend of mine used, and while she may not have meant it exactly in this way, I find it useful. In our younger years, it seems that we (some moreso than others) are turned off by the commonplace. Most of my previous decisions seem to have been made based on how much they flew against the current, countered convention,and worried my parents. I have ALWAYS chosen the exotic over the familiar. My constant search for the next adventure has left me…tired…but hopefully wiser.

I am still an advocate of the heart. I am still in search of an adventure, but these days I try to lead with my head, and see if my heart agrees. Here’s why, I am finding that the best adventures are the ones that last, and in order to last they have to make sense. We find satisfaction and peace, at the confluence of the exotic AND the familiar, not one or the other. Finally, sometimes and perhaps quite often, the “obvious thing”, the seemingly straightforward decision, can lead us to places of unexpected joy and adventure.

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