When I was 17 years old I was absolutely sure of what I wanted to do in my life.
If you asked me what I wanted to do, I would answer with all the certainty in the world, without doubting for a minute that answer. Today, 10 years later, the situation could not be more different.
How many times have you stopped to ask yourself "I have no idea what I'm doing with my life" and felt bad about it? Especially after two or three years of graduating from college and without the slightest prospect of being the next success story on the cover of Forbes.
It happens man, not everybody is a movie star or achieves success before 40. Do you doubt?
Is there success after 30?
Harrison Ford was 33 years old when he played Han Solo in "Star Wars", his first successful character. Thirty-three years to make it as a leading man.
Sylvester Stallone only managed to get Rocky 1 off the ground at the age of 30, after working as a security guard and porn actor. The guy even sold his own dog in order to support himself.
In the art world, Leonardo Da Vinci sold his first work only after he was 30. Artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Franz Schubert and Johann Sebastian Bach only became successful after they died. On the Internet, the guys at Young Nerd It took them more than 5 years to manage to live off their own project, and almost 10 years to become one of the biggest success stories of the Brazilian internet.
We live in a generation where our stars and references are getting younger and younger. Everyone wants to be the new Felipe Neto, Justin Bieber, Bruna Vieira, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and others, who achieved fame and fortune at an early age.
No one dreams of working for years to achieve success; more people try their luck on the end-of-year accumulation test than on a college entrance examination. There is a rush to succeed soon, but no one sees that they are the exception.
Most people achieve and attain their dreams through hard work, sweat and tears.
What do we want from life?
Not to mention the pressure to decide what you want to do with your life soon. You are barely 18 and out of high school and you have to choose a career that you will follow for the rest of your life.
At family dinners, there is always a relative who asks when you are going to give up your shenanigans and find a woman for yourself. When you are dating everyone asks you when you are going to get married.
We are pushed like rag dolls from one choice to another.
And many times we are in a hurry, we don't want to be left behind: "All my friends are in college and I'm not? I need to pass this vestibular soon". We jump from choice to choice to just go with the flow, leaving out what matters most: What we want out of life.
I have at least 5 friends who finished their first college and then went on to do another one, since the first one was not exactly what they wanted.
Not to mention the people who have graduated with me who have gone on to work in fields that have little to do with their degree.
To assume that you don't know exactly what direction you are taking is to understand that you are lost. Better to take that step back to move forward than to live a lifetime on automatic and regret it on your deathbed.
A personal story
Let me tell you a personal story. In 2013, after almost four years working in one of the biggest media groups in the country I was promoted to editor of a big website. The salary was good and my whole family thought it was a nice position. I hated that job.
I went to work unhappy, spending eight hours a day doing things I didn't believe in, having to answer to superiors who no longer added anything to my professional life.
This unhappiness spread to all other layers of my life: personal, family, love... Like a cancer. After almost a year of suffering, I realized that this was not what would make me happy and I just let it go.
I had to hit rock bottom to understand that this journey was not the one I wanted to follow for the rest of my life.
Today, working on my own, the difficulty is to be able to keep a job successful enough so that I can have a fixed income per month and live comfortably. If the site doesn't work out, what will I do tomorrow? I have no idea!
A Step Backwards
Growing older has given me the security to try to stabilize myself in what I live now and stop projecting my anxieties into the future. Dreaming that I will be a successful businessman doesn't mean that I will become one unless I start working now.
So I set shorter-term goals that are less ambitious but easier to achieve. The only certainty I have is what I have now.
The key is not only to focus on what my family expects from me, but on what I want for myself. To find a career that allows me to be myself and that respects the values I believe in.
No amount of money in the world can pay for the joy when you are happy with something you are doing. Some will think that what you love is nonsense or a waste of time. Patience.
So if you have no idea what you are doing with your life right now, that's okay. Take every step backwards that you take to get momentum going forward. No one has a full idea of what they are going to do for the rest of their life.
Patience. One day or another you will figure out what to do with your life, or not. What matters is that you are happy.
Text inspired by:It's Okay Not To Know What To Do With Your Life (At Least, For Now)