If you asked the freshman-year-of-college variation of myself what he wanted to do for the rest of his life he would’ve told you he’d like to be a consultant, a public speaker, and a professional sales coach. Something, something, influence and persuasion.
I was (and am) a moderately talented public speaker and I had an abstract fondness for the challenging, personal growth environment of sales.
I’m also a natural introvert who has minimal tolerance for what I perceive to be irrational human behavior, I’m a skeptic who’d be bored to tears in any meeting of consultants throwing around words like “synergistic”, and I harbor too many self-doubts to have a modicum of success coaching other salespeople through their own.
These shortcomings are blatantly obvious to me looking back on my life with the benefit of hindsight, but they weren’t exactly hidden character flaws at that point in my life either. Unacknowledged maybe, but not invisible.
Despite that, I confidently strode into a post-graduate life of salesmanship like I owned the place and did well. That is, until the cognitive dissonance of leaning on my shortcomings expecting them to become my strengths nearly snapped me like a baby carrot.
That same year of college the sorority girls who lived in the dorm down the hall from ours were looking for help assembling their new furniture set and I gleefully spent three hours putting it together while they grabbed lunch.
My father is a software engineer and I naturally pushed back on the inclination to follow in his footsteps but I had a information systems course as part of the business program. I walked into the final exam horrifically hungover and was the first student to turn in my test which I later found I had aced with a 100% score.
Some of my earliest memories are of playing Age of Empires on the home computer. I didn’t just play though. I would design custom maps and create battles in the built-in map edit software pitting thousands of samurais against waves of elephant cavalry, or whatever. The battles would be so intense that our poor computer would nearly burn up. It required me to do more than just place soldiers. I had to build triggers and conditions that prompted them to move in ways I wanted. In a way it was coding - and this was when I was eight or nine.
Again, hindsight is 20/20, but it’s always been relatively clear to me that I’m systems-oriented and I enjoy building in a structured way that allows me to fall into a deep state of focus for uninterrupted hours.
At some point I made the decision to move into a people-oriented career path and stuck to that decision despite all of the signs pointing towards another direction.
I think we all have a tendency to ignore the aspects of ourselves that conflict with the preconceived notions we’ve developed of our own identities. Primarily because warping our interpretation of who we are is an extremely difficult thing to do. It’s much easier to warp our environment to fit the existing definition. I’d go as far as asserting that most of us have never consciously decided who we are. We’ve allowed the thousands of interactions with others and moments of failure or triumph to build that model for us.
So we ignore the obvious inclinations we have and stick to those things we may not enjoy, but that fit our mental models of who we are.
Now that I’ve embraced my personal preferences - after only 26 years of life - it seems bizarre that I ever thought I could be somebody else. But perhaps I still haven’t fully uncovered the person I’m meant to be and I’ll look back in another dozen years in amazement. (“I can’t believe I ever thought I wanted to be a woodworker” says 37-year old me as I hammer together a replica viking sword in my basement blacksmith forge.)
The point being, the seeds of who you’re meant to be exist in what you have always loved to do. Not in the vision you have of who you are meant to be that’s been influenced by external factors.
Do the things that you do in your free time align with those things that you get paid to do at work? Even a little bit?
It’s important to view yourself objectively from the perspective of who you actually are, and not who you wish you were.
Your happiness and fulfillment depends on it.