Let your curiosities guide the way

I often get judged with my age whenever I get to any professional discussion. 

Yes, I am just turned 30, I am single and I have 12 years of total experience in working with both corporate and several other industries. 

Growing up in a traditional family had me thinking every time to become someone so successful in the future that I could fulfill all those wishes of my family. 

I started early, I started young to make me prepared for my upcoming days. When I started my career, one of my goals was to find my calling. 

I never knew I would land somewhere becoming everyone which has transformed me into who I am today. with all those experiences and knowledge I gained during my tenure with the companies, clients, cultures, and different countries that I visited.

In reality, I ran towards helping others find their purpose because I failed to truly think about my own. It’s not that one’s purpose can’t be to help others and be of service to others. But I found it easier to hide behind that idea than to actually think, is this really what I want to do?

I worked with 

Companies in India and served many in Eurasia, now need to know that they need more young managers with fresh and technical ideas which will boost up company’s profile and its sales. 

Hiring Managers should know today's workforce is not going to get controlled by our old and so-called matured managers. The thoughts and the way of doing work by us is different.

Not achieving my purpose sent me into a spiral of depression. Then when I was in the pits of depression, I just kept feeling sad that I wasn’t being able to make my purpose work. So I continued deeper down the spiral.

What was even stranger was that I had become blind to the fact that I actually didn’t like the work I had to do to “achieve my purpose.” I was so hellbent on making it work that I ignored all the signs that I wasn’t really happy.

It wasn’t until more than just a few saw what I was doing. They called me out on the purpose I had set for myself and essentially told me to scrap it. The actually painfully pointed out to me that I was really hiding from myself and some of my demons.

Instead of facing my struggles head on, I resorted to helping other people face theirs. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it only pushes aside the real work I had to do with myself.

I asked myself who am I. I asked myself what are my values. What am I willing to stand for and what am I willing to not tolerate in my life?

I picked a list of about 10 words that carried some weight with me. I started to define what they meant for me. How they would guide my life. How I would not compromise on them.

Authenticity — The activities I do every day to be in line with who I am. They have to correspond with the values I created for myself. If it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a no.

Creativity — It’s important to have a creative outlet in my life and just create. Without any singular purpose. It helps me get the ideas out I have in my head and feel like I’m contributing to the world.

Ambition — I have a desire to help change this world for the better because I’ve been given so much. It’s the drive that never lets me be complacent.

Empower — Not everyone has a voice. So how I can go out and give them a platform, a service, a product for them to make better decisions, speak out their truth, or live better lives?

Growth — I always want to be learning and stretching myself. To see what’s out there. It’s what makes me a better person and keeps me on my toes.

Adventure — What’s life without a little fun?

Writing these were difficult. Some seemed like values I was supposed to have but didn’t actually believe. Some values seemed nice to have but I had to admit to myself that I really didn’t care about them. But once I was done and looked at all the worlds, it all felt right.

Now that I had my foundational values, I thought the next step was taking a step to find my purpose. Yet life seemed to have other plans. Almost seemingly scripted, I went to two philosophy talks on campus.

One was about the meaning of life. The other was about stop trying to find yourself. Perhaps life was trying to tell me something.

I worked towards realizing this so-called calling of mine. Heck, I started a whole business around it.

At the speaker broke down and debunked various arguments of what different people thought the meaning of life was: service, love, death, family, no meaning at all, etc etc. As I continued in closer and closer, I was waiting for that profound meaning at the end.

The little moments of awe are the little moments in between life’s events that tie all the dots together.

If the meaning of life was to experience more awe, then all I had to do was stand still, watch and listen to the world around me. There is awe everywhere.

The main takeaway I got from this 1st International Lecture was that life’s meaning shouldn’t be predicated on a singular, big, giant, all-encompassing thing, which if you don’t have, your life becomes meaningless. That’s a lot of pressure to place on one idea.

Rather, life’s meaning should be placed in experiencing life itself.

Life is made up of those little moments of awe and wonderment. It’s made up of the conversations between friends and family. The spark you feel when you meet a lover. The excitement in your brain when you finally get a topic. One can find meaning in all of these things.

I did have some takeaways that I found useful.

The first is that in our pursuit to find ourselves, we box ourselves into these labels and don’t think we can change them in the belief that we are being authentic. I found a quote from Michael Puett that best explains this idea.

“‘I should try to find myself — my true authentic self, and once I find myself, I should always be sincere and authentic to who I really am, loving myself and embracing myself for who I really am, loving my good sides and embracing my bad sides too and part of that loving and embracing means making decisions in life based on what’s best for me, and who I am, and how I will fit in with the world.’

All of this sounds great — we think this means we’re living a liberated life according to what’s best for us, but part of what’s intriguing about these ideas from China is they would say that this isn’t just a wrong way of thinking, it’s a potentially dangerous way of thinking. They would argue that there is no true single self — that we are complex, messy beings filled with many different emotions, dispositions, faculties, with many different possible sides of us that could play out in different situations, so from this point of view, the argument is that as messy beings, we can often fall into patterns and ruts of behavior that tend to define us as human beings, but the goal is to break out of these limited patterns and ruts, to try to overcome these limited patterns and ruts and open up possibilities we couldn’t even imagine. So they [the ancient Chinese philosophers] would say: ‘No, don’t look within and love what you find, because what you find is probably a bunch of very limited patterns and ruts.” -Michael Puett

Another way of thinking about this through the lens of a fixed mindset. With me, I just assume that I’m always going to be stressed, that I really will never get coding no matter how much I try, and that I’m going to struggle with existentialism forever.

I’ve adopted these beliefs or patterns of behavior

And because I believe these traits are so fundamental to who I am, I shouldn’t try to change me. Because why would I want to be anything but me?

We are not defined by these patterns or anything for that matter. Therefore, we should stop trying to find ourselves.

Instead, we should just be.

So I finally don’t actually need a purpose?

Almost. I am not opposed to anyone attempting to find their purpose. But being so hellbent and tunneled vision on trying to find it can often be limiting. We fail to recognize the moments of awe around us. We don’t become present in our day today. And we ascribe our entire identity and purpose to arbitrary words and patterns of behaviors that generally have no grounding.

Additionally, seeking purpose is fluid. In life, people will move from purpose to purpose as they find their ways to new experiences, interests, skills, and people.

So why devote your entire existence to a static idea when we very well know that humans are dynamic, ever-evolving creatures?

So what should I did instead?

The answer came to me from a networking call with one of my connects from Nepal (Br Tm). I remember asking her how she goes about pursuing her career interests amongst the many options out there. She commented that some people have that one thing that really lights them up on fire but she never really had that. I asked what she did instead.

“I follow my curiosities and see where they take me.”

Everything clicked when I first heard that. I realized that a life led by curiosity is so much more liberating and freeing than the one I had tried to force myself to pursue. Following my curiosities meant I had the freedom to pursue whatever I found interesting at the time without the need of anything more.

So for those who have lost their purpose or never had one, to begin with?

Try following your curiosity.

Still not sure where to start? Answer some of these questions and see where they take you.

What’s something you want to learn?

What’s something you’d be doing in your spare time?

What do people always come to you for help with?

What’s a problem you can’t solve?

What do you love to do?

What do you want to do less of and more of?

Notice that some of these questions come from that purpose Venn diagram. If you do manage to find the intersection and get yourself a purpose, awesome. But if you don’t, don’t sweat it. You’re moving in the right direction.

As long as you’re enjoying what you’re doing (and doing something about it if you don’t) and letting your curiosities guide the way, I’d say you’ve got the opportunity to lead a really meaningful life.

#storyteller #nishantdiaries #Ihtcsf #NTI #aimt #intellegentmen #instinctivemen #soul #semt #lemonc #purpose