What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
Eleanor Roosevelt
This quote haunts my dreams, changing the direction of my approach to life.
What you think you want and what you are usually so far from each other.
Unfortunately, our society values working 8-hour days 5 days a week, waiting for the weekend to do nothing so you can get ready for your next week of work.
This isn’t how it needs to be!
Success in the Mundane
I understand that people do enjoy this lifestyle of working for the sake of working, they love their job and how their life is set up.
It’s not for me.
You can call me a lazy Gen Z but I don’t see how working yourself to death at a job you’re not passionate about for money you spend on things you don’t enjoy leads to a meaningful and fulfilling life.
Regrets of the Dying
Although morbid you will die.
You will cease to exist and everything you ever did with your time on this planet will eventually be lost to time.
It’s easy here to fall into nihilism, believing if nothing is worth anything why do something?
I don’t have a good combat to this ideology the closest I can come is from the last words of the dying.
When you’re on your deathbed, hours away from passing you will reflect on the life you lived.
In her book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying Australian Caregiver Bonnie shares her experiences with the dying she outlines the top five regrets of those in their last time on Earth.
- “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
- “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
- “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
- “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
- “I wish I had let myself be happier”
Notice how none of these are reflecting on the money they made or the extra time they spent doing something they didn’t enjoy.
The common theme in these regrets is what they thought was important and worked towards their whole lives wasn’t even close to what fulfilled them.
The number one regret being that people wished they were more of themself is so terrifying to me.
People can live their entire lives, decades and decades chasing something that means nothing to them in their final moments.
So how do we decide what to chase?
Pick A Thing!!
I don’t want to hear any of this I’m too old, I’m not experienced enough, it’s to hard, I’ll never catch up.
You need to be a lifelong learner.
Be curious.
Take interest in things you otherwise wouldn’t.
Start gardening, do some drawing, climb a mountain ANYTHING!
The thing is even if you pick the wrong direction you now know what you don’t want to do.
Often that’s more useful than getting on the right track straight away.
Trying what you think you’ll like is your first step, if there’s something that’s been nagging at the back of your mind that you wish you could do, DO IT!
The perfect time will never exist you will NEVER be ready.
And that’s ok.
Pick a direction and see where it takes you.
I post writing tips every day if you enjoy, check out this post;
Leave a Reply