What You Do For a Living Should Feel Elemental
I have told you before that skills are the path to happiness.
But it’s deeper than that.
Attaining aptitude for the sheer purpose of accomplishing something because others are chasing it too won’t lead to genuine fulfillment.
Instead, developing skills that empower your natural talents and fulfill certain passions may be what you aught to pursue.
In other words, where you spend most of your time should feel elemental.
Why is this an important pursuit?
It’s important because when you get there, your work will create mental energy, not expend it.
When you are working in your element, you are having such a good time that even your sense of time changes.
Think about it: when you immerse yourself into activities that resonate with something that just feels right, an hour seems like 5 minutes. On the contrary, when you immerse yourself into activities that do not resonate this way, 5 minutes can feel like an hour.
Sir Ken Robinson said it best,
”If you’re in your element in what you do, at the end of the day you could be physically exhausted by it, but spiritually uplifted [non-religious terminology to reflect the sense of animation]. But if you’re doing things you don’t care for, at the end of the day, you can feel physically fine but just mentally down.”
There’s another benefit to doing work that is elemental: you will have a better chance of performing well, succeeding, winning accolades and making a difference.
Several years ago, I started auditing every single thing that I enjoyed at work, everything I won accolades for doing and every difference my work was making for patients. When I interplayed all these events, I identified the very actions I needed to focus on to feed my spiritual energy. It revealed what future projects or positions I should pursue to further grow this spark. So far, this practice has paid off massively.
So here’s what I want you to do: sit down on a daily, weekly or monthly rate and list down those actions about your job that you truly enjoy. And then, dig deeper into those individually to identify what exactly it is about these activities that spark joy in you.
For example, does brainstorming strategic concepts naturally play into your talent for ideation? Does talking to your peers and working on their problems naturally play into your talent for supporting people?
By way of identifying what you resonate with, you’ll be able to work backwards and identify what experiences you should chase so that you spend most of your life doing things that resonate with your soul.
Take care. See you next time.
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