Just how many lives do you think you have?

A neighbor and her husband are planning on sailing across the Atlantic next year. Her husband had recently made the trip, going first to Bermuda, then the Azores, before docking in Gibraltar. I asked her if she was afraid of being out in the vast Atlantic, all alone, in a, by comparison, tiny catamaran. She replied, “Heck no. I see people die all the time. I want to live.”

My friend and neighbor is a nurse in the oncology department at a local hospital. She does see people die all the time.

It made me wonder about the difference between people who choose their work as though they will always have another shot at doing what they really want to do and people who live life by their own rules, doing work that is completely satisfying. And making certain they do it before they die. Considering a person will work 40 to 55 years of their life, why would someone choose work they didn’t really enjoy? Especially if there is something else they prefer doing or are destined to do.

There are probably numerous answers to this question but the overriding one I believe is: Fear. People are afraid if they don’t take the job offered another won’t come along and they will be destitute. They fear that following their dreams is indulgent and selfish. They fear if they don’t earn a lot of money, whether they like the job or not, others will judge them, their family will suffer, and they will be living in the streets in their old age. They fear their calling is the wrong calling. Regardless, it boils down to the same thing: They are afraid of what could happen if not taking the “safe” route. Personally, I am more afraid of dying and not doing the work I was intended to do.

Even if you can get past these fears, you may be wondering where to start. This insightful article, Career Assessment: Finding Satisfying Work is a great guide. According to the article, key to alignment is:

1. Discover what you are designed to do.
2. Do it.
3. Minimize everything else.

I don’t believe the issue so much is that we don’t know what we’re designed to do but that we enlarge everything else in our lives so that our purpose becomes inconsequential or worse, forgotten. I recall a friend from high school who had the most beautiful singing voice. Her performance in the school’s version of Fiddler on the Roof made me gasp at its perfection. Today, I understand she is a hospital administrator. Great job, no doubt, but I am saddened to think what the world has lost in not being able to hear her sing.

How to intend your career: One extremely, inordinately simple formula

I want to focus a little more on “intending” your career. This is not a recent revelation, the idea of intending a career, but something I have known about for quite awhile. It is just that I forget that it is always possible; especially when there appears to be so many different career choices when a person is intrigued by many things. So, if you’re flailing about, wondering what you really should be doing with your work life, consider, perhaps, that the plan has already been decided.

I am aware that sounds a little (OK, a lot) fatalistic but I read somewhere, a long time ago, that the things we did as children, things that interested us, are an indication of our purpose for being. This is supposedly because, as children, we were still close to our originating source so that it was easy to remember our reason for being born in the first place.

As a kid, I loved to find better solutions to problems and fascinated why other people had difficulty or no interest in devising strategies for solving problems. The most dramatic example of this was when I was in the first grade. It was close to Christmas and the project was to make a glitter angel with glue, paper, and glitter. This was not a particularly challenging project. As my classmates lovingly sprinkled glitter over each millimeter of glue to produce an angel, I found their method to be too elementary (I am aware of the irony) and time-consuming. Yes, even at the age of seven I was looking for ways to consolidate activities to make people, myself in particular, more productive. So, after drawing my glue outline, I dumped the entire bottle of glitter onto the paper, my rationale being to gently fold the paper in two, and allowing the excess glitter to fall back into the bottle. Voilà, glitter angel. Let’s move onto the next project.

Unfortunately, this is where I learned my first lesson that some people are more interested in preserving their comfort zone or schedule than they are in innovative production techniques. My teacher, Mrs. Sheets, stopped me the moment I had dumped the entire contents of the glitter bottle onto the paper. She appeared mortified and proceeded to chastise me in front of the entire class for being wasteful and a “glutton”. A 7 year-old glitter glutton. I do not jest. She then had me dump the glitter back into the bottle so that I could start over even though after returning the glitter to the bottle I had my angel! Go figure. It took me many (adult) years to realize my teacher was annoyed because my quicker method to completing the project meant she would then have to alter her plans to accommodate my now free time and she was obviously not prepared for that.

As they say, I regress. At an early age, my aptitude, competencies, talent, and interests were clear. The problem was that this all seemed too broad. It would have been easier had I a love affair with insects, toy trucks, or the violin. Passion in those areas would substantially narrow the career choices. When your abilities are broad-based, however, suddenly there are too many paths from which to choose. But, if you look closely, what you should be doing is there, buried beneath what others think you should be doing (unless, of course, everyone keeps pointing out a specific talent you should be honing) or what you have resigned yourself to doing because it was available at the time you were looking. Neither is a good choice.

It’s not too late. It’s never too late. You can shift course, you can refine, you can choose. And you will be totally, completely, awestruck by the results. Your first step to getting to this is becoming single-minded in what you wish to achieve. Fear and doubt fall away when you see your goal.

I wish it were more complicated than this because then we would have an excuse for not having done it sooner.