14. Find your flow
There are support groups for people addicted to alcohol, but not for those addicted to work (even though they are called workaholics). Although you wouldn’t want to be in an intimate relationship with one, you might like one who works for you. If you are the customer in a “customer is king” culture, you won’t be opposed to the idea that someone is “working their ass off” (see ASS) to meet your deadlines.
Unlike other animals, we have come to believe that we have to work to survive, and work hard to thrive. Other animals just live. This work-centric existence includes the 10-20 years of schooling to poorly prepare for work, followed by 30-40 years of work, then 20-30 years to poorly recover from that work. Would any human being voluntarily enter into such a deal? If not, we can conclude that there is a very high level of social coercion involved. People don’t think they have any other choice.
You may consider it self-evident that work is necessary to survive, just as you may also take as a given that ours is a world where there is not enough to go around.
For a moment, consider that you are alive as an individual, defined by an individual potential. To embody this potential, you have to be doing something. Because you may not yet know what that something is, you may be doing something else. You may be doing something you don’t really like, in fact. Maybe even one job after another that you don’t really like, getting closer to what you like by process of elimination. Carving an elephant by removing everything that does not look like an elephant. If you see your current job as a stepping-stone towards your potential, it will change how you do that job. It is very different from doing a job because your family or society has pressured you to do it. This is a dangerous compromise, one that will ultimately hem you into a life of quiet desperation, sapping your spirit and losing sight of your potential.
There is only one way to thrive, and that is to do things you love. Only in doing these will you find the sweet spot of feeling capable and challenged at the same time. Some have referred to this as a state of flow. Tapping your own boundless source of creative energy, you will create the conditions for bounteousness all around you. Prosperity will follow, not measured in monetary accumulation, but as a well-spring of abundance.
If you are in a job that is not right for you, do this one thing today as if the survival of your soul depended on it.
Take the think you most dislike about your job. Call to mind how it makes you feel. Then call to mind an experience where you felt the opposite, in other words the way you really want to feel. Try to make the experience vivid such that the emotion it creates is palpable. Then imagine yourself doing something that creates this same emotion. Make this imagination vivid, like reality. Your body can’t tell the difference between the emotions of “real” experience and one that is only experienced in the mind.
The “real” experience that will create these emotions in the future has already happened if you look back from a forward perspective. Cultivate a feeling a gratitude, just as if it had already happened. You may not know immediately what your next job should be, but you will be in the right mindset to make it happen.
Why such fuzzy advice instead of just going out to look for a new job? Because if your state of mind is equivalent to what you are now doing, the new job you will land will most likely be equivalent, regardless of its differences. You will learn about some new things you don’t like, but will be make very slow progress towards your potential.
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