Finding Success, Outside Of The Box
It can feel intimidating to take the path less traveled. When it comes to work and a career, I have often felt at a disadvantage in comparison to my peers. I didn't go to college, I didn't go to trade school, I've never had 5-year plan or a strong sense of "what I want to do."
Degrees, accolades, income, and titles are typical metrics for success and security in our world, but they never felt as important to me as following my intuition.
Your Livelihood Is At Risk
I am not a fear-mongerer. I don't live my life preparing for the worst. But, I am a strategic thinker and I excel at looking ahead, anticipating obstacles, and redirecting so I can keep moving forward.
It's crucial to objectively look at where we are at globally: Unstable political environment. Increasing and alarming climate catastrophes. Social polarization. Inflation. High taxes. More tariffs. AI automation.
These things impact Every. Single. Industry. They lead to layoffs and budget cuts. And they can quickly lead to poverty when there are not enough social supports in place to handle the upheaval (spoiler alert: there are not enough social supports currently in place.)
Not Setting Goals: How Fear Runs The Show
If you never set a goal, if you never have big dreams, if you never allow yourself to hope or trust that things will be great for you, then you never have to risk disappointment if things don’t work out. You also never have to be accountable for follow-through. You never have to worry about letting yourself down or letting others down; You don’t risk the embarrassment of talking about something and then it not manifesting, either in the way that you wanted to or within a timeline that you expected.
The Case For Embracing Imperfection
We are facing a world where we are attempting to take perfected versions of ourselves into real life.
We are not only applying fillers and filters to our faces, we are now trying to apply it to our personalities, our relationships, our work, our creativity. We are so terrified of the things that make us innately human — our “imperfections”, that we are trying to artificially manufacture perfection across our entire lives.