Do you leap out of bed every morning excited about your day? Or do you have to drag yourself out of your comfortable sleep and force yourself to get ready?
Most people have had at least one experience when a special event is about to take place the next day and you jump out of bed as if you don’t want to waste your precious time one sleep. Why is it that for most people this experience is distant memory? How many of you have concluded that this is what happens as you grow from being a young child to an adult. But let me tell you that for some people in the world, it is commonplace for them to wake up most days with great enthusiasm and energy for the day. That is how is should be. So what happened to many of us to stop that happening? The answer is that many of you are not doing what you love in life. We all have a gift in something and if that gift is not nurtured and developed then we will forever be wishing for something in life but not knowing what. As we get older we simply forget what it is that gave us joy when we were young and we pursue various career paths thinking that is what we want. Yet once we are set on such paths we wake up each day not really looking forward to work, or feeling half-hearted about it all. Let me tell you about someone I met a few years ago. He was a bus driver who I met at an awards ceremony where he received an award for customer service nominated by his passengers. I got talking to him and learnt he was a fully qualified medical doctor. I was astonished to say the least and asked him to tell me how he came to be driving busses. He told me when he was young he loved trucks and was collecting toy trucks. He got a licence to drive them as soon as he was old enough. His parents knew about his passion but they pushed him towards an acceptable career. He said he was always telling people he just wanted to be a truck driver. He did well at college and got a place on a medical course. Even in his vacations he was driving trucks to bring in some money. He says he knew his heart wasn’t in his medical course but he kept hearing his parents saying he needed to have a stable job and how hard life would be not knowing when the next salary would be coming from.
Soon after qualifying he was working as a doctor but he found that he was longing to get outside behind a wheel, and was having trouble getting up everyday to get to work. Then one day he decided he would have to do what he loved to do and gave up his job as a doctor and went back to driving trucks. Then he saw a job for bus drivers and applied and he says he knew everything fitted perfectly in his life. He even went back to college part time to learn about engines. Nowadays he is running a profitable business in upgrading and maintaining truck engines and he gets to travel the world to work on various contracts. He followed his passion and he is now making more money then he would have if he had stayed a doctor. I mention money because that’s the first thing people think of when choosing what to do in life, when actually money should be secondary.
By following your passion and nurturing your gift- you will find that your life will start to slot in perfectly. If you haven’t read the speech that Steve Jobs gave about the dots connecting up together, I will urge you to read it. It’s a similar story of how he followed what interested him and only years later did he realise that by following his passion he has gained amazing success- the dots all joined up. The bus driver, and Steve Jobs are not isolated cases, and so I urge you all to follow your passions and if you do not know what they are, or you feel you have no particular gifts then read one of my books and start to change your life.
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