Don’t Do What You Were Born to Do
Doing this will condemn you to a life of frustration and misery.
They all tell us to do what we were born to do. And so we spend years searching for that one identity that we believe is who we ‘really’ are.
And as we search, we become less and less happy about who we are today. We think that we are a square peg in a round hole. That we will not ‘fit’ in life until we find our unique place in the world.
Stop searching. Don’t do what you were born to do. Because it doesn’t exist.
Or, as Ozan Varol puts it,
To describe yourself with a single, fixed identity is to insult your vastness and conceal and suppress the multitudes within you. We end up serving our identity rather than changing our identity to serve us. Our narratives become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you tell yourself you’re awkward in social settings, you’ll avoid social settings, which will weaken your socialization muscles and make you even more awkward.
Our life is a journey, and when we seek a single identity for our career and our life, we put a stop to that journey and restrict ourselves to a narrow definition of ourselves and our work.
No wonder so many of us describe ourselves as ‘stuck’.
How to really find yourself
So what’s the alternative? Instead of telling ourselves that we were born to be a banker or an engineer or even an entrepreneur, we aim for growth.
We realise that we change as we journey through our life and that what we did in our twenties may not satisfy us in our forties. We realise that the fun is in learning and developing new capabilities, building on what we gained before, and trying new roles as we move forward.
The fun is in growing, not finding that one, special identity we call ‘us’.
I discovered lots of ‘selves’ inside me
When I was 18 I got an A grade in Spanish in my English ‘A’ levels. I then spent a year studying in Spain and became fluent in the language. When I got to university I switched to Economics because I figured that since I could speak Spanish there was no point in studying it further. I then became passionate about economics and became a banker upon graduation.
By the time I hit my thirties, I was aching to express myself more, so I became a corporate trainer teaching communication skills. The banking experience helped me understand the corporate environment of the executives I was teaching, but I had to learn a whole new set of skills in my new career.
Ten years later my itch was to learn more about myself and my inner world, so I learnt Neuro-Linguistic Programming and started my own seminar company in personal development.
And today I am much more introverted than I used to be and thrive on being alone with my laptop — communicating with the world in writing.
The secret of true fulfilment
Don’t let my story fool you — it wasn’t all a bed of roses. But it was the journey that fulfilled me, not doing what I was born to do. Learning and moving forward instead of feeling stuck made the hard times worthwhile. When we are growing inside and outside we are doing what we were born to do.
Growth prevents us limiting ourselves to being either corporate or solopreneur, either extrovert or introvert, either a pleaser or a player.
I was known as the life of the party, the pub, the disco, and the club when I was younger. Today, reading and writing give me all the excitement I need. And I get just as ‘high’ with a good book today as I used to with a good beer.
So give yourself a little rope. Don’t suffocate your spirit with a noose that chokes off the multitudes within you, the chance to find out who you really are in all your different guises.
Don’t sit in your organisational cubicle aching to break free but frightened to unleash a new persona within you. And don’t sit at your iMac wondering who you should be to your readers when you can discover lots of ‘who’s’ if you just write and write.
Remember, it’s the journey, not the identity, that gives you the fulfilment and joy in life.
So aim for growth and bask in the pleasure of seeing yourself change and develop as the years go by.
