Getting started

Going to work is for most humans not as rewarding as for some persons who can claim to be doing what they really truly want. The natural order is seldom respected and more and more people end up doing something they don’t want. Last time I went to Portugal on holiday I could see that most of the people there where doing their jobs for the money (utterly in order to be able to exist), and not out of love of actually doing it. To be honest that sucks. I can imagine that cleaning toilets or filling a car’s tank may not be the dream job of someone but still. Too many of this little tribe called humanity ends up doing something else than what they were supposed to do in the first place.

I did that too quite a while at the University as I needed money to pay for my studies. I had a goal and the jobs were a mean to simply get through it. So far so good. I actually did it happily because I knew it was serving my super evaluate goal. To pay for a higher education that was mainly higher in costs than anything else. But then came the necessity of paying bills getting me slightly off road from my goals. Work, when used as a tool is the answer. I usually don’t see someone doing his true calling as work. It’s his thing; he MUST do it - that’s his mission. The world goes around with most of its inhabitants doing what they don’t want. Our economy is based on it, having people with high hard super evaluate goals to achieve in order to keep up with the jobs nobody wants. It ends up twisting the whole natural order as too many people are doing their jobs when they don’t want to do them, taking the place from those who actually are meant to do them! I have a friend working as a salesman at a big high tech gadgets reseller. That’s his true calling. He blows the chart numbers every month and he is still honest when selling his gears. And he has fun. On the other hand most of his colleagues are not suited for the job and are there for an “in-between-job”, being bad workers and complaining all the time while performing against their own will. I am sure there are tons of salesmen eager to get there and to enjoy doing their jobs. They don’t. Most of human resources' challenges are to find a motivated candidate. In my working history I’ve been doing things I didn’t really want to as work but I enjoyed it because it was getting me closer to what I desired. And it was fine. I always have in mind a Portuguese phrase that states: “Se não estás bem, põe-te” which is a good way of saying “If you don’t like your situation, change it”. There are hundreds of opportunities out there. And usually we only need one in order to change. And move on.

At some point in our lives we should reach the moment when there is no more super evaluate goals except the one to do what we really want to do. No more doing any kind of job to pay bills. Maybe it’s age? Maybe it’s just an ipiranga scream? In any case, it calls for changes and a “no more of this” feeling. I went through this feeling a couple of times, always applying a politic of scorched earth in order to leave my past duties and jobs behind. Nothing is better to know than that you can’t go back in order to go ahead. New starts are a mix of discovery and surprises, not always the best ones but it is the way to grow and to create oneself anew. Walking this particular road may lead you to actually finding out that this is not for me, I need to take another path in life. Neither a success nor a failure - it’s a try for a better life and contentment. Happily I found myself in many of those moments and I’m glad for each one of the turns my life took and still will take, as I am sure this last one was not a one-way street. Deep down I know that I would never live with the sour taste of “what if?”.