Are You Building A Life Of Value?
This may be a phenomenon in Asia more than a phenomenon in other areas of the world, but as I travel round from company to company helping people with their communication needs, I find an increasingly large number of people who are completely dissatisfied with the work they are doing. They hate their industry, they hate their company and they hate the work they do day in and day out. Is that what life is about? Is that it? For many people yes it is.
For many of these dissatisfied people, they have followed the advice of their parents, friends, teachers and peers and done what they were told was “the right thing to do”, For others they just followed the crowd and did university courses their friends did because it was a cool thing to do. But all this advice was profoundly wrong. It was wrong because the advice came from a perspective that was not theirs. They never followed the things that interested them, they followed advice that put them at odds with who they really are, and now they are suffering in jobs they hate, doing work that does not fulfil them and feeling miserable all week.
A life of value, where you make a contribution to the world, does not come from doing a job you hate. A life of value comes from inside you, doing what you truly believe in. That could be developing a solution to one of life’s problems, it could be doing everything you can to create a better way of supplying electricity to homes and workplaces or it could simply be building a business that caters for our beloved pets while we are out at work. Whatever it is, you do it because you love doing it and you really believe in it. Going in to work to push paper around an organisation so that you get a pay cheque at the end of the month is never going to make you feel fulfilled and happy. It is going to cause you misery and depression. And at the end of it all, when your company pushes you out and says, “sorry, you’re too old”, What will you have? If you’re lucky you might have a reasonable pension, you may have kept your marriage together or still living with you life-partner, but you will have built nothing.
We live in a world where almost anything is possible. Starting your own business has never been easier and doing what you truly want to do is now more achievable than ever before. We need to stop listening to the advice of others and start listening to our own inner voice and do the work we want to do. The opportunities to go back to college or university and learn something new, or even learn a new skill through YouTube (I learnt how to take care of and polish shoes properly through YouTube) have never been better. You do not need a lot of money. All you need is a little time and some real belief in yourself and you can start doing what you really want to do. And when you start doing what you want to do, when you start doing something you really believe in you will find that every aspect of your life will improve. You will have more energy, more enthusiasm more love for you friends and family and above all else you will feel much happier about yourself.