Knowing What You Want
Dec 11 2011

Grand Canal - China

Knowing what you want is a blessing and a curse.  If you know what you want, then you know the usual paths of achieving it.  You can improvise along the way, but if you know you want to be a singer, doctor, lawyer, teacher, pro football player, screen writer, monk/nun, landscaper, etc. you follow a prescribed path for the most part.  It’s a curse because a) someone can decide you aren’t good enough, b) you actually aren’t good enough, c) you weren’t born into knowing the right people, or d) you always seem to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.  Most people do not become world famous singers, athletes, novelists, or movie directors.

Not knowing what you want is also a curse and a blessing because you can drift aimlessly wondering where you belong and in what you might be phenomenal.  You can be strong at many things but unless you know that you want to be an entrepreneur, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Martha Stewart, Dilbert, a world class surgeon, a lawyer, etc., what you end up doing probably won’t feel like a custom made glove.  The blessing part of not knowing what you want to be when you grow up is that you never had a burning desire to be  Lady Ga Ga, so you aren’t as disappointed when you roll out of bed and you aren’t her.  The blessing is also that you can decide to like what you are doing and find ways to make a difference and change the world in your own little non Lady Ga Ga like fashion and still have people think you are pretty cool.

My son says he wants to be a soccer player and my daughter says (only recently) that she wants to be a singer.  I’ll see if I can steer them towards being a soccer playing physicist and a singing doctor.  I wonder how that will work.  Despite our best voluntary & involuntary attempts at showing them the life of an entrepreneur is not laced with candy, they might be crazy like us and commit entrepreneur-icide.

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