Your Path Is Yours Alone
Why the last thing you should ever do is to follow your peers.
I would like to think that I’ve been quite different from my peers since the time that I graduated from high school. After all, I went to Indonesia for one year to work as a voluntary English teacher to students from less-privileged families at a vocational school.
But that’s not true, of course.
I am quite sure that I chose to go this route because it seemed ‘cool’. Because it seemed ‘different’. Because I could impress my peers when I got back from the trip.
But here’s the thing: I never came back.
Ever since the moment I moved to Indonesia, I’ve been living in foreign countries exposing myself to different cultures. Not because I wanted to be different, but simply because I fell in love with it.
For a long time, I’ve come to see learning about cultures and how to bridge differences among them, as my life’s purpose. Today, I am not so sure about that. But still, I am as much in love with intercultural learning as I ever was.
Obviously, the whole time I’ve been trying to figure out how to actually make a living doing this thing I love.
And so far I haven’t really done a great job at it.
Overlapping interests
But then, if you keep doing the things that interest you, you will inevitably find more than one thing that you are passionate about. For me, that has been writing.
For most of those years, I’ve been trying to build a successful blogging business around my expertise in the field of intercultural communication.
And I think that this is exactly what it means to find ‘your own path’.
Essentially, you take two (or more) of your interests and combine them, so that they form something that only you can do. Something, where the word ‘competition’ doesn’t exist.
But I think that there is not just one way of doing so. Through the combination of your interests, you can create multiple different options for different businesses that might (or might not) work.
Your job is then to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
And this is why it is completely irrelevant to think about what your peers do. Nobody has exactly the same combination of skills, interests and business opportunities as you.
Only you can figure out the point at which all of these overlap in a way that provides real value for your potential customers.
A constant state of discovery
The problem is that when you are following this path, you are inevitably going to feel lost and confused. It usually takes years to get the point, where you can make a very basic living off this path of your own making.
During all this time, there is no …
… guidelines to follow.
… way to know you’re on the right path.
… real support from anyone.
People around you are only going to question you. They are going to say that you are crazy for what you are doing. That you should get a proper job. That you should be realistic for what you want.
Following your own path is lonely.
It is also a very slow process that often seems as if you are not making any progress at all.
After all, you are still in a stage of discovery and exploration. You haven’t reached the point yet where you know how your interests, skills and business opportunities overlap.
You haven’t yet found the sweet spot between what you love doing and what the market truly needs.
Conclusion:
No matter what situation you are currently in, there is a great multitude of opportunities that you can follow. With my combination of skills, interests market opportunities I could do things as diverse as:
- become a copywriter for intercultural communication firms
- become a self-employed intercultural trainer who uses his blog as the primary marketing tool
- write books about intercultural communication and use them as the basis for a coaching program
- organize intercultural communication seminars/webinars
- etc.
What I need to figure out is (a) to which of these options the market responds best and (b) which of these options I personally enjoy the most. And nobody can help me with that.
I can only figure that out myself.
What your peers can do is to help you with the necessary connections and by giving you advice on certain aspects of your business.
But when it comes to the question of what exactly this business should look like, then you won’t find the answer through other people.
Ask yourself:
- What do I really love doing?
- What are my most essential skills?
- What are the biggest problems in my industry that I can solve with these skills?
- What could a business model look like, that brings my skills, interests and the market opportunities I have identified into alignment?
Each week, the editors of On The Rise and Struggling Forward will collaborate to create specific content related to a predetermined topic.
This week we have chosen to write about the question of ‘what it feels like for us to be pursuing something different than our peers’. Check out Aleesha Lauray’s article on the same topic by clicking the link below.
