What is your life calling?
What does it mean to follow your life’s calling and how might it feel when you’re well on your way? Long story short: It won’t be easy, but it will be fulfilling.
Too many people subscribe to the fantasy that your life’s calling should come naturally, feel easy, and automatically lead towards success. They believe that those who have found their life’s calling were somehow fed talent and success with a silver spoon. Natural inborn talents, hereditary privilege, or just plain luck are all beautiful yet fallacious fantasies that people tell themselves.
We’re all capable of finding or creating our own callings. But to do so takes time, tenacity, a willingness to learn, and the resolve to never give up. We must be willing to overcome our fear and take the leap.
Though fear never truly goes away. Those who follow their calling lean into fear. They know fear is there but they push on anyway.
Following your calling means practice, probably years of practice and even a decade’s worth. But not just any practice will do. You must partake in deep practice. What is deep practice? If what you’re doing for practice feels easy and enjoyable, it’s likely not deep practice.
Much like the strengthening of a muscle, which must be worked past its comfort zone and slightly injured so that it can grow back stronger, we must do the same to our skills. Its the practice that hurts, when you’re tired, when you feel like doing anything else but practicing, when you’re struggling to stay the course, that is truly driving your forward.
Challenging yourself is the only way to truly begin mastering skill(s) and progress on the path of your true calling.
Remember that you don’t have to go it alone. It is another fallacy that successful people rise to the top on their own. The self made man is a myth. Sure, it is true that they struggled and put in more effort than anyone around them. But it is also true that they had comrades, mentors, and influential figures throughout their journey.
Isaac Newton’s quote: “ If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” puts things into perspective. Whether we know it or not, we are all standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. Mentors though, deliberately lift us upon their shoulders, at least for a time.
We will all find mentors on our journey, and sometimes in the most unsuspecting places. Mentors can come in many forms, the most common being the “Yoda” type character. A wiser person of our same or similar vocation, who imparts their wisdom upon us in order to help us succeed. But mentors aren’t always so apparent or positive.
A mentor can come in the form of a harsh lesson you need to learn. The specific person may not seem like they’re in your life to help you at all, in fact it may clearly feel as if they are trying to undermine you. But even these relationships can be a form of mentor-ship, testing your resolve. These mentors test and strengthen your commitment to your true calling.
Your true calling will very rarely be laid out as a path in front of you. It is far more likely that your true calling will be the culmination of the choices you made in your life. Paradoxically your true calling is what you’ve done before now, and what you will do moving forward.
Everything you’ve ever done has in some way or another been a part of you finding your true calling. It is never too late to find your true calling. Many times, it is when we are struggling the most that we find what we are truly meant to do.
When things get tough, lean in.
This late night post with its sporadic prose brought to you by Jeff Goin’s book The Art of Work.
