Only The Curious

There were two really great blog posts in my inbox today, both of which left me feeling better about my life and the way I’m running it.

Matt Chevy wrote about focus. Sort of. Really he wrote about priorities. He talked about how time and time again he’s set himself up to do things – write 500 words a day for his book or write a blog post every day for a month – but then fizzles out well before the task is completed, because he gets overwhelmed and it starts dragging him down. I was relieved to hear I’m not the only one who does this, often over and over again. Just this morning I woke up thinking about the fact that my 30th birthday is this month and I’ve only done about half of the things on my 30 before 30 list.

He came to the conclusion that it’s important to focus on your priorities, and not worry about the things that are taking time and energy and weighing you down. If they’re really important you’ll get to them, and if they’re not, then it doesn’t really matter if they happen, does it?

I left his post feeling okay about not doing all of my 30 things. In reality, I’ve done a whole bunch of other epic things this year I couldn’t have planned for myself, and I might have missed out on them if I’d decided, for example, that I needed to stay home and write more instead of going rock climbing for the first time. My resolution is to follow my energy – what’s flowing, what’s working, and what I’m getting excited about – and not let my worries over my unwritten book keep me from getting things done. I’m going to trust that when the time is right, the energy will start flowing for those things.

Then I opened up Peneolpe Trunk’s post. Sometimes I think she’s brilliant and sometimes I think she’s crazy, (she’s both) but she’s always a good and thought-provoking read. She talked about several things in her post, but the one that stood out to me was the idea of decision fatigue, and how people only have so much capacity for decision making on a daily basis. At a certain point we tire of figuring things out. I think this is why my boyfriend and I fight the most right after work – when we’re both burnt out from the day and something as simple as deciding what to make for dinner can provoke us into hostile miscommunication and anger.

This is also why I’m most productive in the morning, despite the fact that I’m not a morning person. Being self-employed and working alone means I have to decide what I do with every minute of my day – how I do it, where I do it, and ideally, why I’m doing it. By about 2pm I’ve got three free hours and a list of things to do, and by that point I’m usually tempted to call my mom and let her pick, or make a list and pull one of my possibilities out of a hat.

It makes sense that overwhelm and overcommitment aren’t just about time – maybe there’s time to do all of it, but is there energy? Mental capacity? Focus? Decision-making ability? I think both of these posts really get to one point: simplify. Figure out what’s most important, what will have the greatest impact on reaching your goal, and do that first. Don’t let anything else distract you. Don’t worry about what you aren’t doing. Then if you’ve got anything left in the tank, you can start writing your book, or learning spanish, or deciding what to make for dinner.

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I used to have anxiety attacks. All the time.

Walking to class, talking on the phone with my mother, sitting alone in my dorm room, I’d be thinking about my day, or my plans, or my life, and it would crash over me like a wave. My hands would sweat, my stomach would feel knotted, I’d get lightheaded.

There were lots of reasons for this anxiety. But I think it really came down to one thing: I wasn’t living my life the way I wanted it.

I wasn’t living my life the way I wanted it, because I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know myself well. I had lived most of my life doing what other people had told me to, assuming the great mystery of why would reveal itself at some point.

For the first 23 years of my life I went to school, worked hard, got good grades. I was president of student councils, wrote for school papers, sang in choir and even tried a sport or two. I was working hard to do what everyone told me to.

But I had no idea why, or what I was trying to accomplish. Just this vague concept that if I worked hard and went to a good college and had a solid resume, things would fall into place. I figured that sometime during college I would find something I loved, and that would be my career, and I would be successful at it.

But the great epiphany never came. There was no life-changing professor to steer me in the right direction. There hadn’t even been an advisor with a decent recommendation on hand. People would ask what kind of work I was looking for, and I didn’t have a good answer. I didn’t have any answer.

All I knew was that, now that I had a degree, it was not acceptable to work as a barista indefinitely. And secretly, I also knew that I did not want a traditional office job; something I learned during a fabulous internship my freshman year – I knew that if I hated just interning at what should have been a fantastic place to work, there was no way I’d ever love any office job. But somehow, if I told people that I didn’t want a “real” job, it made overachiever, overambitious me into a slacker in their eyes.

So I job hopped, which I now like to think of as conducting field research into how I like to work. For the first time since I was able to respond to the question “what do you want to do with your life” with “be a ballerina-rockstar-astronaut-anthropologist-writer-butterfly” I have an answer.

It’s taken a lot of introspection. My meditation practice has helped with that immensely. So has doing a lot of reading and writing, attending workshops, and finding like-minded people who are doing what I want to do.

My answer is that I don’t want to do any one thing. I love variety. I like moving around. I like interacting with and helping people. I also like writing. I don’t like limitations. I don’t want to be limited to doing one thing, every day. I don’t want to be limited to staying in one place for 8 hours at a time. And I definitely don’t want to have the number of days I can travel decided for me.

So it has been amazing me to discover the likes of Chris Gillebeau, Lea Woodward, Barbara Winter, and many others who have made it okay to not want a traditional office job. I feel like I’ve “found my lost tribe” as my mother would put it  – people who are their own bosses, who are location independent, who realize that working and living your life shouldn’t be on opposite sides of the coin. People who make their money from lots of different sources, and who value experiences over objects. People who realize that true ambition is living life the way you really want to, rather than putting in your face time and calling it a day.

I look forward to sharing my experiences as I work to transition out of the traditional workforce and into a life of adventure and fulfillment.

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