N — Navigate yourself to your calling
Previous post “O — Organize your life in preparation for change”
Also posted on http://tarsoxjr.blog
“Knowing what is right is like deep water in the heart; a wise person draws from the well within.” Proverbs 20:5
The last blog in this series, it has been a great experience so far and I have been amazed at how each one of these stories has touched at least one person who has reached out to me after posting. I wasn’t sure when I started off on this journey if I’d be able to keep my promise to myself to do this and not to waste the time I have been given while on this extended vacation. I feel confident in saying that I have not wasted it, not one minute in my opinion. I have more to do over the coming weeks for sure but what an appropriate one to end on as I close in on what will be my next adventure from a career perspective.
The title of this blog brings me back to a quote from Steve Jobs that I referenced early on “”Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” How powerful and true! “Follow your heart and intuition”, this is something I have done in 2017 as much as ever and boy is it paying off. When I left my job on April 7th I was not sure what was next, but I knew what my heart wanted. I have actually turned down 2 job offers in my time off, jobs I wasn’t even looking for but people that found me. I turned them both down with confidence because it wasn’t what my heart wanted and I was following my intuition and putting my faith in God that he would provide exactly what I needed and in the right timing. As usual, His timing is Perfect…I’ll write more about this in the weeks to come but really exciting things on the horizon for me and my family.
I believe in the title here more than ever “navigate yourself to your calling”, notice it says navigate not “aimlessly float down the river of life and what will be will be”, it says “navigate YOURSELF” don’t wait for others, don’t sit around sulking get moving! When I left my job the family and I started out by taking a week’s vacation at the Outer Banks of NC. In the time since then, I have poured myself into learning to code by first going to The Iron Yard for a 2-week evening course, taking 3 Udemy courses on coding and consuming every resource I can get my hands on. The amount of information at our disposal today is amazing, there are NO excuses. It has never been easier to learn if you are self-motivated and have a passion for what you are learning.
The important thing here is I have really enjoyed the process and it has really helped begin to navigate me to my given calling. I have always had a gift for technical things, in fact, a lot of my friends will tell you things magically start working when I touch them. I’m not sure about that, but I know one thing I refuse to be denied, I don’t look at something for 5 minutes and throw in the towel. I will stay up all hours of the night to fix something, whether it be that time my PS3 wouldn’t play Call of Duty and I summarily ripped off the “warranty void” sticker and spent the next 4 hours learning about the inner workings of a PS3. About 3 in the morning I finished up and played 2 hours of Call of Duty (had to reap the reward) or when I had to fix the power windows in my truck and took to YouTube. This was especially impressive because as good as I am with computers I am equally as bad with cars but I fixed it!
I remember when I was working at Dillard’s in college, I was a sophomore and an Accounting major. Trouble was I just failed Accounting 201…not too good. I was pretty bummed about where things were headed and a co-worker and friend was asking me what I enjoyed doing in my spare time and in 1995 my response was “well I like taking apart and upgrading my computer”…this friend said “if you can take apart and upgrade a computer why in the hell are you an Accounting major?!?!”. I had no words…in fact, I went straight to my counselor the next day and changed my major. The rest is history I finished up school went through 2 years of self-study getting my Microsoft and Cisco certifications to prepare for the rest of my career. I hate to think where I would be if that friend hadn’t jarred me into reality and guided me to following my heart, I was able to thank him many years later after accepting my first Vice President position at a software company.
Our God Given calling is a powerful thing and if we just listen to our inner voice and the Holy Spirit our path will become very clear. This goes hand in hand with my post on “Ignore the temptation to make money the goal”. I have been fortunate enough to navigate myself to a career that suits me extremely well and is in high demand. I have also spent my career and life building a network of professional and personal relationships that have served me extremely well also as I noted in “Inquire about opportunities that open for us”. At the end of the day, this DECISION acrostic proved highly valuable to me and gave me the confidence to take this “Leap of Faith”. None of it was easy, there were no guarantees but I put my faith in God and myself and in the next month or so I will confidently step into the next journey in my career knowing I have found my God Given calling and that He is with me.
I hope you have enjoyed the DECISION series, I have another series queued up that will allow me to share some of my father’s stories as he journaled the last couple of years of his life. It was a journal I couldn’t bring myself to read until 5 years after his death but the day I did was really powerful and I look forward to sharing some of the stories with you.
