Found this really nice blog post: http://www.diovo.com/2009/07/what-do-you-really-want-to-do-with-your-life/ that talks about one of the toughest questions I have ever faced in my life and still continue to face. Hence, bookmarking it on my blog :).

One para with which I agree the most is:

"Many people make their decision in life depending on where they perceive the money is. “IT is where the money is” – you will hear people say. The problem is that in IT or in any other field, the people who are highly skilled, heavily motivated and love their jobs tend to collect all the money and all others end up being a bunch of losers who followed the wrong path."

--- Update: The url is dead now, pasting the content here.

What do you really want to do with your life?

Jul 25 2009

Many people, especially in their early twenties ask this very interesting question to themselves: Now that I have completed my education, now that I have to get a job, now that I have to decide the way I am going forward, what should I really do with my life? In this article, I try to answer this question. This may not give you the exact answer you needed primary because the answer is that it depends, but I will try to give you some pointers that will help you decide better.

The same question can take many other forms. How to do things that continue to fascinate me? Should I go for a job or should I start something of my own? What if my interests are not clearly defined? What if I have interests in many diverse fields that I am unable to find a career that connects all those fields?

There is no switch

There is no magic switch that can change your life forever. There is nothing that you can do today that will make you happy tomorrow. Change is a gradual process.

Small steps towards your goal have a higher probability to take you there than the big opportunity which you are waiting for. There is this little secret that I want to share with you: If you are waiting for a good opportunity to knock on your door, it probably won’t. You have to go knocking on every opportunity to see if it is good enough for you. This fundamentally means that you have to change the way you view the world. Your life will not be changed in a day. It will be changed over a course of time, fueled by your immense will power and hard work. The world may see your success on a particular day, but you will know that to be an overnight success, it took you years of hard work.

Even if there were a switch to change your life, it is in your mind. You can flick it any time you need. You can decide to change now, this exact moment.

Take your time, but not too much time

Answering the question of your life is not something that you have to do in a day or two. This is an important decision that you are going to make, a decision that can change the course of your life, and making the decision in haste will not do much good. On the other hand, taking a very long time to find out the answer may not be a good strategy either.

Probably a month or two is the sufficient amount of time you can take to find out the exact path you are going to tread. But don’t confuse this with the actual decision to change. The decision that you have to do something awesome should be taken now. The exact thing that you are going to do can be decided by weighing in all your options and taking your time.

Then there is the fact that people always change their direction once they start the journey. You are in this fog of uncertainty. You cannot see very far in this fog. You don’t know which direction to go, but that does not mean standing still clear things up. Start walking and you can see further.

Stop looking for the next big thing

Jumping on to the bandwagon of whatever is cool right now is not a good life/career decision. Especially in the internet you can see this phenomenon working against many people. Making money off blogging or adsense may seem lucrative, but it is not something to be deemed great. Is what you planning to do worth it? Is it something that adds value to the world? Does it improve the life of at least a small group of human beings even in a slight manner?

The current big thing will always give way to the next big thing. Many people will make some money by joining these fake-revolutions and may be you will too, but that is not a nice path to chase. That is not a glorious war to fight.

What you should be doing is to be the force behind the next big thing in your favorite field.

Forget Money. Money will follow

Actively following money will probably ruin your career. You will end up with not enough money and not enough happiness. That is one of the side effects of following money – There is not enough money, ever.

Many people make their decision in life depending on where they perceive the money is. “IT is where the money is” – you will hear people say. The problem is that in IT or in any other field, the people who are highly skilled, heavily motivated and love their jobs tend to collect all the money and all others end up being a bunch of losers who followed the wrong path.

Whatever you do, if it is even slightly related to solving a specific problem for a small group of people anywhere in the world, it will bring you money.

Finish what you started

I know this guy who can make up excellent ideas for technology startups. Every week he will come up with at least ten new fantastic ideas that can be the next big thing in the web. But still he is working in the underbelly of a gigantic corporation without any clear escape path in sight. His failure is that he never tried to implement any of his ideas.

“I can visualize stuff very easily but I don’t actually like  implementing those”

Usually it is not that the job is not good. It is just that you are lazy. But since you are one among the 3 people who actually cared to read this article this far, there is a very high chance that you are highly motivated and you really want to change yourself. How do you do that? Do the shitty work. Every single job has one. Therein lies the difference between the dreams that come true and the ones that don’t. Successful people follow their cause till the end, and they don’t hesitate to do the boring monotonous work to fulfill their dreams.

You don’t have to love every single part of your job. You have to love the final product. What makes you motivated is not that you are laying bricks all day long, but the idea that you are building a house. The process itself can be boring, but if you have a purpose, it will motivate you.

Follow up and follow through, till the end. That is where the prizes are.

It is not about your job

This entire article is not about quitting your current job and finding a better one. It is about who you are, what you do other than your day job and the impact you can make in the real world. Doing what you love can be done along with your day job. People always have responsibilities and I totally agree that you have to take care of those.

What job you are doing does not affect what changes you can make in your life. Did you know that Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer? He did not become great by winning high stake cases in the court. He became great by winning hearts of the people. Albert Einstein worked as a clerk in a patent office. That did not stop him from working on the relativity theory in his spare time.

Always remember that your dreams are not something you have to set aside to take care of your responsibilities. If you find that your day job is actively coming in front of your dreams (as opposed to helping you achieve your dreams), you may want to think about quitting your job.

Even after 8-10 hours of your regular work, there is enough time to horn your skills and do something that you love. You have always time to read a great book, grab a cup of coffee with an old friend, volunteer for a non-profit fund-raising, or hack your way up in your secret startups’ code base. (If your regular job is taking up more than 10 hours a day, there is something to be slightly concerned, especially if you are working in an organization with more than 100 employees and the CEO of the organization does not know you. Probably then you should be looking for a better job.)

Time is the biggest investment you can ever make in any venture. Don’t have enough money to build your own startup? Don’t worry, invest your time. Chances are that it will pay off better.

It is said that if you invested at least 10,000 hours in anything, you’d be a superstar in that. Think how big a difference you can make if you worked 3-6 hours a day (assuming that you have a day job) on building your skills and working on what you loved most. And use your 10,000 hours wisely. Remember that practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Following others

The reason why some people enjoy the social status, power or the riches is that they enjoy what they do so much so that they are very good at doing it. Blindly trying to emulate others in their game will not be a very good strategy. Find out what you are interested in and then try to be fantastic in it. Be so awesome that they cannot ignore you anymore.

Don’t listen to anyone about what you should do. Learn from others how to do stuff, not what to do.

For example, should you start a blog? Probably not, because if you had to you would have already started one. The fact that some of your friends are blogging doesn’t mean that you too have to. You can go about minding your own business.

Do not try to change your aim every now and then. If you are getting bored at what you do and want to switch your job often then there is something very abnormal about your focus. The problem may not be the job, the problem may be you. May be you are too lazy to do any job.

Finding your interests

Most people belong to the group where they do not know exactly where to fit in. They don’t have any clear ambitions like “I want to be pilot”, but usually they have some vague interests like “I want to do some job where I can meet a lot of people “.

Probably you are not able to decide because you are either running for the money or you are looking for positions that are regarded prestigious in the society and you don’t see any glorified jobs related to what you are interested in and so you (instead of abandoning those jobs) abandon your interests and then go for these lucrative professions and get screwed up in the middle, without any escape path either way.

I know this guy who always wanted to be a pilot. He was very much intrigued by the idea of being a pilot and was always dreaming about it, but since most of his friends joined engineering colleges, he did too. Now he is working at a software company and he is unhappy. If you are clear about what you want to be, then there is no point in waiting for the approval of everyone else around you. They won’t approve your actions anyway. People want you to do whatever everyone else is doing. If you know clearly what you want, just go for it.

If you don’t know exactly what you should do and where your interests are, what should you be doing? I have this friend who is very good at dealing with people, but she does not know what job she should be doing. She worked at this software company where I used to work and she was very unhappy about the job, but unlike the guy who wanted to be a pilot, she did not have any clarity about what she should be doing.

The issue here is that people are thinking more about the job rather that an the end results. Ideally, the end result is what you should be passionate about, not the actual process of doing the job. Most of the jobs become monotonous after some time. If you wanted to become a pilot, you could, but after some time flying it may get boring if you cannot keep the passion for flying airplanes ignited. There is no perfect job for everyone in this world. But there still can be an aim that does not depend on what exact job you do.

Think in terms of what change you want to make in this world. What end results do you wanted to bring in? The job what you do can be just an enabler of this fact.

For example, if you have very good people skills, think about why you have those skills. Is it because you love people? Is it because you can help people? Do you really care for their problems? You can do any job that has enough interaction with real people; you can help them solve their problems. You change their world, and they will help you change yours. You grow by helping others grow.

Don’t expect an idea or a path to come in front of you as you wait. If you are perfectly unclear about what you should be doing, take a white paper and write down all your skills and interests. Write down all the jobs or professions that you think are at least loosely related to the skills you have written down. Now select the job you like the most among those (even if it is a low paying job/business). That is the one that you can be aiming for now. Now you have some aim. You can always refine your aim after some experience kicks in. Don’t ever think about where the money is. Don’t think about what others are doing. You will not be able to beat people at what they are good at. Beat them in what you are good at.

The three steps

There are three emotional stages you undergo before you actually start doing what you really wanted to do.

1. You accept that the current state of affairs is not ideal one. This means that you are not happy with the status quo, you are not satisfied with what you are currently doing. Many people are too stubborn to accept that they are not happy. They are in constant denial of the fact that they are not doing something they love. Accepting the fact that you are not happy is the first step.

2. You accept that you can change the status quo. This is where most of the people get stuck. They agree that their current situation is not ideal, they agree that they would like to do a lot better, but what they don’t agree is the fact that they can change their situation. Accepting that you are solely responsible for your happiness is the second step in your growth.

Once you have found the best thing to do, how much time should you wait to switch to it? How much time should you wait for the best opportunity? How much time should you wait to gain some experience?

The answer is no time. That leads us to point number three.

3. Leap before you look. You have already done enough thinking, and then some more. Now it is time to really do something. Start doing what you are supposed to do and you will find that your situation has improved and you are going in almost the right direction. Improve, move forward, and repeat. You may want to change your direction later once you are equipped with more information about yourself and your interests and skills.

And finally, don’t settle. You can always do better. I would say best of luck, but you don’t need that.