The Unmapped Bridge : Real-World Success Handbook
The missing lesson college could never teach you is how to define life success on your own terms.
While many now say,“A college degree is now merely equivalent to a school diploma”; which is partly true, this does not devalue the type of person and sheer resilience it takes to complete an academic milestone of higher education.
Now what? If you’re like 99% of your college-educated age group demographic; you’re probably “just figuring it out” and chipping away within the corporate circle. Landing a big-name consulting job. Or making ends meet on the ramen-profitable diet while pursuing the entrepreneurial dream to be your own boss. Maybe you just don’t know.
Whatever your story is…
the next goal isn’t so obvious anymore.
No one is handing you a syllabus with directions on how you should be spending your time in order to ace that next sociology exam. There is no class schedule dictating how you spend your time or where you need to be and when. No deadlines to meet, but the ones you, your employer, or if you’re lucky (you) set for yourself.
I took a Business Ethics class in college where in one of our lectures we were discussing the famous Socrates’ quote,
”…the unexamined life in not worth living.”
As you might imagine, this is not a question we were used to answering even after the hundreds of tests we’d taken. It forced our highly-caffeinated student-selves to press pause for a moment and actually think about what is truly important to us on a personal level and the best part was we could neither be right nor wrong about it.
Success, like many other things, is subjective in nature although many of us, including myself, tend to forget this fact somewhere along the way to getting to our next goal or destination as we grow up.
What’s Next?
I’m not going to go on a rambling lecture about the downfall of the typical Millennial trend and proclaim your newfound destiny is to face the imminent struggle of the landing a job in this market or tell you what you “should be” doing now that you have a paper diploma in your hand declaring you’re ready to face the world like a man (or woman).
If you are like me; you’ve probably had it with the classroom bureaucracy of our American education system where you’re rewarded for memorizing information better than your peers, but punished for thinking outside-the-box. If anything; that paper also speaks volumes about your ability to follow through with your goals and your capability to now decide for yourself what to do next with your one wonderful life.
*Note: You do not have to be a college graduate as a prerequisite to having a worthwhile life purpose or direction, however, having one is definitely an experience worth investing in if that’s your thing and you have the available resources to do so. *
As long as you’re blessed with the gift of being able to wake up; you are qualified with the necessary license to direct your own story.
What I will tell you, is this:
Every new day is also an opportunity for you define your own life syllabus.
Deep. I know. And not just when you graduate college, but at any phase in your life. Whether you are 20 or 90; the cards and next move are in hand.
Whether you have the financial privilege of being able to head straight to graduate school for your next accomplishment or will be suiting up for a 9–5; it is critical you examine and maximize whatever current resources are at your disposal to create and define your own experience, aka what you wake up to every morning.
It’s almost natural to automatically map out the next goal to cross off our bucket list, but it’s just as important to take a step back to get some perspective on what makes life worth living outside of what we’ve been unconsciously been trained to think is expected for the next steps in order to have more direction and inner fulfillment from steering lives with purpose.
I don’t know about you, but I hear so many stories of people who have “made it big” and are successful at the ripe age of 30 or 40 in their professional lives, yet end up having an existential epiphany when they realize they are still unfulfilled in other areas. Something seems to be eluding them, but they can’t quite place their finger on exactly what that is.
An existential crisis can happen at any age. In fact ,it is more common in adolescents now more than ever due to the overwhelming amount of options the digital age presents, but do you really want to be that old nearly-graying bald guy who’s CEO of some company he has hated working for the last 30 years or possess the aged wisdom of the boy that realized this path would never truly fulfill him, but that he could still grow up without selling his soul’s happiness?
Decide to consciously be responsible for creating your own Neverland, now.
You just have turn on the news to see that the material elements of this world (e.g. fame, wealth, good looks) are not enough to sustain a level of happiness and internal fulfillment that convinces the individual of the value of their own life. I prefer not to use specific examples of people we’ve lost this year in 2018 such as Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, & Avicii, but do so here because they are examples of high-profile people who, for their own personal reasons we may not ever fully comprehend, decided to leave this world due to a level of suffering experienced here that they felt there was no other escape from other than death.
Grow, but Don’t Ever Grow Up
I believe we have the ability within all of us to overcome the societal mold we’ve likely all grown up in and accepted as our true reality rather than seeing it for what it is:
the world we were simply born into.
Not necessarily the rules we have to abide by.
It’s like that song Stressed Out by Twenty One Pilots. Suddenly all the friends you’ve been surrounded by for 4+ years separate into their own paths and drop the word “busy” like a new cult culture we were all supposed to adopt to seem grown up, mature, and professional when in reality we all (well, most of us) have no idea what we’re actually doing nor have we stopped to honestly answer that burning question in the back of our minds about why we’re doing what we do on a daily basis and if we derive any valuable meaning from it.
Use the time post-college, or at any point in your life trajectory, to press pause before starting the next chapter. The pause can mean something different to everyone. It can mean 1 minute of reflective meditation in the morning or 1 year of taking break from the next thing you felt you “should” be doing to navigate towards a new direction that you should and actually like doing and thus, should be doing.
Wherever your journey may lead next, make sure that inner Peter Pan voice / intuition / or gut-feeling is alive; and that you’re doing it your way on your terms. Keep the magic of childhood dreams where anything was possible afloat by…
consciously making choices that make your soul happy.
Granted; this does not mean you must quit your 9–5 and travel the world Bordain-style in order to start living your best life like your fellow Insta-grammers.
I am saying your best life is here today. Not stuck in the limbo of a distant future when you cross off your next achievement and society has given you a pat on the pack for doing so with a job title, diploma, or whatever it is that gets your short-term fix of endorphins going.
Here’s Peter Pan’s✨ little secret to never growing up:
The best reward comes from doing what excites you without expecting external rewards.
From completely shutting off your constant thinking about whether you’re getting the moves right and instead just doing the solo dance required to make your own magic in this world.
Peter Pan wins in that the boy lives life on his own terms, regardless of how that looks like measured against societal expectations.
We can’t all live in Never-Never land forever engaging in childish, in-the-moment behavior and do whatever we feel like, blissfully ignorant of future consequences. At least, not if we want to take true responsbility for our immaturity and growth. Although for some, like Peter Pan; that is success, we can also choose to take responsibility for creating our own happiness by defining what success looks like for us individually short-term and long-term.
That’s what they mean when they say money can’t buy happiness. Someone can seem happy on the outside, but be suffering internally to the point where they feel the only way out is taking their own life.
Instead of questioning whether your every next move is the right or wrong choice; I suggest you keep it simple and remember a time when you were doing something that gave you that warm, cozy Christmas morning anticipation of having presents to open downstairs.
Painting? Coding? Reading? Writing? Running? Travel? Cooking? Dancing? Photography?
As long as it puts a smile on your face (not talking about the emoji’s you’re texting into the groupchat); it’s worth giving a shot.
Each day should be like a present waiting to be opened.
Only this time around; you get to decide what’s inside.
That, my friend, is success.
Follow me on Medium Camilla 🌹Rose and Twitter @camillarose_ux. https://twitter.com/camillarose_ux.
For more conscious writing on mindful life design follow my publication: https://medium.com/lifestyledesignmag .
