The Bumpy Start

Can you predict the end of the journey from its beginning? Yes or no or maybe? Ok, let me ask a better question. Can you be absolutely sure about the end of a journey, by just looking at its nascent stage? No, all you can do is to derive from the experience of other people and try to draw an analogy. But you can never be sure. So, what shall you do in this case? Do you give up? Probably not. You would still try to predict the end in either the positive or negative way, depending on the good or bad starting and most importantly depending on your way of thinking.

If you are the kind, who always tries to see the light at the end of a tunnel, you would try to picture a smoother ride for the latter part of the journey, in spite of its bad or bumpy start. You would recollect the happy moments, the so called positives of the journey so far and try to weave a similar happy happy picture for the future. And you would try to forget or ignore the bad part.
But things can happen the other way as well. You may pain the whole picture black by just looking at a black dot you would have noticed.

Now, in either case a decision needs to be taken. In the first case, you will happily continue the journey, dreaming about the pleasant future. In the latter, you may be so afraid that you may not decide to continue the journey ahead and head backward or somewhere or even stop?

The important point is that in the positive case, you have HOPE and hence there are chances of success. But in the negative case, you have already given up, accepted the defeat and certainly there is no success. You have to make the call finally. 

Do you love your job?

There are people who do their job and earn a living. There are some who do their job very well and are successful. And there are a few who love their job and find a true joy in it. I wonder how many of us fall in the third category? Probably, not many!

I question, are these people special? What did they do to facilitate this? Probably they are god-gifted in some sense. But a more logical answer I could find is that they pursued their passion, instead of following the herd. Without worrying about the initial hurdles, they continued it and sought a career out of it.

I can probably quote a couple of examples from my personal experience. There is this friend of mine, who is a toy designer. She was supposed to be a regular IT engineer, but obviously she hated being that. She chose to go along the less-trodden path, following her passion in design. Now, she is a budding Designer, bound to achieve something big down the line. I wish her all the best. Then, there is a batch-mate from college and a very close friend, who always wanted to go in finance and business side despite his engineering background; not because of the attractive pay, but his genuine interest. So, he prepared hard on his own by writing exams, reading books and finally made the switch. Now, he is the CFO of a well-known organization in education domain.

Other alternative is to go the reverse way – finding passion in your job. This is not as easy as it looks. But I have seen people who have done that. I know a colleague from work, who got into a job which he did not like as it did not suite his interest. So, he kept on resisting it and obviously was not very successful. But one day, he was assigned a challenging project with stringent deadline. He had to do it and he did. As a result, he was so much engrossed in it that he found true joy in doing it. Then he never turned back and now a successful manager, passionate about his work.

So, the conclusion is to follow your passion, stick with it and the success will follow. If you don’t know, your passion, what is it that excites you; then look around and try to find one. It will be somewhere there probably covered with some dust, which you will have to discover and polish it.