“I don’t know what I want to do” is one thing we can expect to hear from both a 10-year-old & a 50-year-old.
Whether you’re choosing your major for college, changing jobs, starting a new business, contemplating retirement, and even if you’re self-employed.
It haunts us all. The decision on how to spend our time, how to create value, how to make money & how to live the way we want to live while doing it.
Unfortunately, even when you answer it one time, there’s always the (high) risk of it coming back around every few years or so.
It definitely is the case for me.
The reason I love self-employment & the very reason I am self-employed is to do whatever I want to do.
Pursue the craziest things, start & stop as many times as I wish, pick up the most random skills, and do the most useless degrees - all while freelancing just enough to sustain myself & having to explain all of this to no one.
And the best part? There are no consequences. There is no resume that is tracking my erratic behavior.
It sounds like a god damn dream.
Until you’re stuck with the question “I don’t know what I want to do”.
It can sometimes be no different than the problems we might have all had at the start of our journeys. Being plain unhappy with our jobs.
You think you’ve come so far but you actually haven’t.
While spending many months with a blank mind on how the hell I want to spend all this free time I’ve created for myself, I would sometimes have a burst of inspiration wherein something interests me enough to look into.
And I realize they’ve all come from actually living my life.
And by that, I don’t mean in a grandiose sense. It does not involve travel to a foreign country (which a lot of people will make it seem like is absolutely necessary in order to realize things about yourself.)
But just in the act of not doing nothing.
I read a book & something a character is doing sparks my interest to make me want to look into it.
I listen to a podcast that reminds me of something I wanted to pursue as a child but completely forgot about.
I hear someone talk about their work & start thinking about whether I would be any good at it.
I hear of someone’s accomplishment & feel a tinge of jealousy.
I need to live my life to know how I want to live my life.
I need to:
Have interests,
get out of the house,
read different books,
look at people
have pleasant & unpleasant feelings
Being given the gift of free time is actually a huge responsibility. You get the time but you don’t get a roadmap on what best to do with it.
And you need that roadmap.
Because if you’re not doing things with it, it feels like a waste of life.
And we sure as hell aren’t giving up a steady paycheck to waste our life, are we?
Paradoxical but true!