Finding a Meaningful Career
Some people start careers on their weaknesses. There is a magician by the name of Mystery who was horrible with talking to women, but then he decided one day that he was going to figure out how to talk to them and start relationships with them by getting out of his house and trying different things. He then invented a method that worked for him which he called the Mystery Method. Now he teaches it to men all over the world. Overcoming a weakness can be a more interesting selling point to people and a more fulfilling career to you than your natural external strengths and talents.
I got into personal development because it was a weakness in my life. I would pretty much go with the flow and had no control of my life. I was extremely gullible as a child, if a neighborhood friend said to eat a lizard because it was cool, I’d do it, but my natural talent was music. I can compose and produce tracks really well. I tried to do a career with music but it wasn’t satisfying for me. Producing music doesn’t fulfill me, but I find personal development more interesting because it’s a strength I built and continue to do so. I can show people what I’ve done with it. I’ve lived and experienced a lot more as a result of being proactive and applying personal development. Even though I’m still young and have more development to go, I’ve digested enough material to share with you.
Most of your innate talents and strengths are hardwired into your brain and are genetically predisposed.
Innate talents vs. external talents
Maybe I and Mystery had the basic talent to overcome our weaknesses. For instance I’m good at music, but what makes me good at music? The most basic substance of my musicality is being creative. I’ve used that basic core to solve my problems in personal development by thinking out of the box.
What was Mystery’s external talent? It was magic. What innate talent must be present in order to perform magic? Performance.
Think of the verb. If you create music, you’re creative. If you perform magic, you’re a performer. What Mystery did to solve his problems with women was going out and performing his routines and stories to them. Don’t focus on the noun of what you do well; focus on the verb to find your core strength. You can use your innate talents to change all areas of your life if you want.
Use your innate talents to foster unique external talents
We all know generic stuff doesn’t sell. I’ve made a lot of generic music and all it made me was some lunch money. My biggest tracks were those that filled a niche most other tracks weren’t doing. Then I realized that music wasn’t something I could be my best self in. I became known among my peers as the encouraging motivational guy. How can I use my innate talents to develop original external talents?
Ask yourself, “What would make others feel good?”
In the gaming industry, game play and entertainment value is more important than design. Consider some of the greatest games in history… The Super Mario Brothers… a simple side-scrolling game that’s extremely fun. Look at Pong… a design 0, but it is still played regularly today.
In music, there are a lot of well-produced tracks, very crisp and clean-sounding, but that’s not what makes them a hit. What makes them hits are if people can relate to them and if they are catchy and original. Take Soulja Boy for example, the demo version of “Crank Dat” sounds horrible but it’s highly shared and posted on YouTube regardless of the poor sound quality.
Don’t let the fine details stop you from doing what you want to do. If you’re giving a speech, focus on getting your material across first then correct the poor body language and voice tones later on. If your speech is great, most people won’t notice those things.
Obviously this concept doesn’t apply in all industries. If you go to a doctor for surgery you want to make sure his or her technical refinery is higher priority than making you feel good.
Be you
I was at a local bookstore’s self improvement section with my girlfriend a few weeks ago, and after reading a lot of the books, they all started to sound the same… “Smile when you meet someone new.” “Give a firm handshake.” There is a great reward in being you. When you speak from experience, you’re able to connect with people. It’s like a paradox of being rare but common at the same time. Your story might be rare, but another person may have had a similar experience which is in common with yours. Maybe there is also a taboo that most people don’t like to talk about, but you do, and that’s what makes you attractive.
Be timeless
The book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie is a prime example of a timeless product. It was written in 1936, but its advice on social skills can apply to any period in history.
Love your competitors
Competition can be looked at whatever angle you want. It doesn’t have to be fierce. Your competition can be viewed as your helpers. They reinvented the wheel for you and all you have to do is put your idea on it to improve theirs.
Do what you love, yet practice self-discipline
What might be hard for one person might be easy as pie for another. Physics might be hard for some people. Some people believe they can do physics with their eyes closed.
If something is hard for you, you can train your mind to make it seem easy. My favorite exercise is to list all my excuses for why I don’t want to do something. Then write a list of solutions for each excuse, then I box in the one that I intuitively feel is the best. Any type of solution can work. It can be a semantic solution like “keep trying.” It can be a practical solution that tells you exactly what you need to do. It’s like mental weight training. Once you pass a certain amount of weight, the amount you felt was difficult is now easy.
If you’re not doing what you love, you might want to examine your current career situation. I don’t understand how people get so attached to their careers even if they don’t like it. Maybe it’s a product of social conditioning. This lady I know believes that making money is the only thing that matters in a career. Well no, if you think your career sucks, it sucks. How can anyone stay in a job they don’t like for 10 or 15 years?
Turn your hobby into your career
This lady’s obsession with movies and dolls is insane. I think she’s a really good example of using escapism to get away from a career she’s apathetic about. It’s no big deal to watch a movie every weekend or something, but she’ll stay there all night, and she’s loaded with dolls, not like a shelf but the whole room. It’s crazy! It would make more sense to have them if she was a doll manufacturer, but it makes no sense when it serves no part of her life’s purpose. If you have an obsessive hobby, why don’t you make it into your career? It seems perfectly logical.
Long before this website, I used to listen to music all day and write songs, and then I started producing them with computer software and posting them online. Then record labels started contacting me to sign my tracks. Artists were also calling me to produce their music. I later decided I didn’t like that career, so I started this site. There’s always a way to turn your hobby into a career, and with the internet, it’s a whole lot easier now.
The first step you want to take in turning your hobby into a career is to find out what is holding you back from doing so. Let’s say you’re afraid to start a doll collecting and trading business. Write down on your paper why. List your reasons for instance:
- I don’t have the time
- I’m afraid it’s going to fail
- I don’t know how I’m going to get customers. Etc
For each reason keep writing solutions until you find one that counters the original reason completely. You might be an hour or more on one fear trying to figure out solutions, but don’t stop there. Keep doing this over and over till you’re aching to do something about it. It’s not about repeating generic positive affirmations; it’s about literally attacking the fear with the right affirmation for each negative rationalization.
What you’re doing is focusing your mind on something more important than the fear and it turn solving the fear. It might not solve it 100% right now. You might come to the actual stimulus and find more rationalizations for why you fear it. The wheel keeps going. Go back and write them down, and keep using the same pattern until you’ve thought about it so much and acquired intuitive solutions that the fear is gone for good. Fear isn’t something you’re going to totally destroy overnight. Some people are like John Wayne. They’re motivated by fear and do it anyway. Weigh different techniques out and see what works best for you.
The worst fear I feel is actually writing down the scenarios on paper. This is pretty awesome because afterwards in the real situation I don’t feel that irrational fear anymore. Sometimes you’re not able or don’t have time to write down and rationalize your fears away. Sometimes you have to grab your balls and go in and do whatever it is. Don’t limit the methods you’re going to use to attack your fears.
When doing the courage sheet, you might even be afraid to apply the rational solution. Do the whole process over again till you’ve destroyed the wheel of fear. Even if you don’t know how you’re going to be the world’s next greatest motivational speaker, you can get a small idea that gets your feet moving forward. Maybe you might start preparing some motivational speeches for YouTube and grow an online fan base until somebody asks to book you. Don’t deny that you’ll ever reach the goal. Keep moving your feet forward.
Get educated
Some fears can be solved by simply learning new information. I was a little afraid to set up this blog because I had no clue how to do it and I thought I’d have to pay a lot of money to get someone to do it, but then I watched a youtube video, and I realized setting up the blog was extremely simple. There wasn’t even much code to edit early on, only enough to get it to connect to MySQL.
-
This article is Copyright © 2008 by Gerry Cueto Jr. To send feedback or request permission to reprint it, please contact Gerry.
Check out some great articles by various personal development authors.
