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Visit vw.ca to learn more. SUVW, German-engineered for all. This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 299, and it's the struggle to find career focus by Chris and Wong of TheWildWong.com. Get ready to maximize your potential with optimal living daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week.
Your Optimal Life Awakes. Now here's your host, Justin Molick. Hello, Life Optimizer. Welcome to Optimal Living Daily, the podcast where I act as your personal narrator and read some of the best blogs I can find covering personal development, minimalism, and more.
And I'm Justin Molick. Thank you for being a subscriber of the podcast and part of this little family of oldies, optimizing your lives. It's been fun, and if this podcast has helped you even half as much as it's helped me reading all these inspirational and motivational and actionable posts to better our lives, and I'm sure you're well on your way to a better life. But enough of that, let's get right to the content and continue optimizing your life.
The struggle to find career focus by Kristen Wong of TheWildWong.com Like most people, I've wanted to be many different things in life. At four, I wanted to be a ballerina at age seven, a veterinarian. When you're a kid, it's kind of fun to decide what you want to be, because it would change your mind whenever you want. For example, I found out vets have to watch animals die, so that was a deal breaker for me.
As you get older, the question, what do you want to be? Becomes a lot more stressful. Writing has been a constant all my life, but my career uncertainty didn't stop when I realized that's how I wanted to earn a living. In fact, that's when the uncertainty kicked in more than ever.
I wondered what kind of writer I wanted to be. I searched for neat little titles I could label myself with, technical writer, screenwriter, essayist, blogger. Even now, I earn a decent income and have a neat little title on my business card, but I still struggle to find focus in my career. It's something that's been on my mind quite a bit this year, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts.
When your goals evolve. Six years ago, I moved to Los Angeles to write scripts. For a while, I actually earned a living doing that, and sometimes I still do. But it took a long time to admit it may not be my one true calling.
I'm not as good at screenwriting as I am other types of writing. Screenwriting is very different than writing an essay or a short story, and the more I did it, the more I realized I lacked a desire to improve. In short, I was faced with the idea that, yes, I enjoyed screenwriting, but maybe I didn't want to be a screenwriter as much as I thought I did. For years, I ignored this.
I kept trying because the first thing you learned when you set your sights on something ballsy is to never give up on your dream. I didn't want to be a failure. I didn't want to join the ranks of thousands of others who moved to LA to write scripts, only to abandon their dream, so I kept forcing it. I kept writing half scripts.
I kept joining screenwriting groups and going to meetings that felt like a waste of time. There's nothing more exhausting than forcing yourself to accomplish something you don't really want in the first place. Even worse, I neglected writing the kind of stuff I actually wanted to write. I was operating from a place of fear rather than a place of inspiration, which made it impossible to find any kind of career focus.
Your definition of success versus theirs. Finally, I asked myself a question. Why would working on something else make me feel like a failure? The answer?
Other people. I worried about what everyone would think, from my family, to other screenwriters, to my friends back home. They all knew I moved here to write scripts, and now I wasn't writing scripts. Never mind that I briefly earned a living as a scriptwriter and just found something else I wanted to pursue.
It would look like I failed. Scriptwriting is just one example. I lose focus more than I care to admit over what other people think. I allow their noise to drown out my own voice, and I cringe to think of how much time I've wasted with this nonsense.
I allow their definition of failure and success to trump my own. When you know what you want to do, you have to drown out the wrong noise. Otherwise, it's so easy to lose focus. In high school, for example, I was in debate.
I was pretty good, and I liked it. After a while, though, I realized I loved writing articles from my school newspaper, and I wanted to dedicate more time to that. Here's what my high school debate teacher said when I quit to devote more time to the newspaper. I always knew you were a quitter.
Now, my debate teacher was a notorious fool, but I actually think he was trying to do something good here. Convince me to stick with something I love. Ironically, though, he made me second guess doing something I loved because he thought I was a failure. Yikes.
Just now as I'm typing this, I'm realizing how much his words have stuck with me over the years, and not in a good way. I've found myself back from doing things I'm good at, and I enjoy, because I worry people will think I'm a quitter. A better way to put it? I've found myself back from success, because I worry people will think I'm a quitter.
The role of multi-potentialism in career focus. Maybe it's time to redefine what it means to be a quitter. Quitting doesn't necessarily mean you give up on your own dreams and expectations. Sometimes it means giving up on other people's expectations so you can focus on what matters to you most.
After all, your own expectations, interests, and goals evolve. In order to grow with them, you have to shift focus, and it's hard to focus when you look through someone else's lenses. Also, quitting doesn't mean you stop doing stuff entirely. I'll probably want to write a script again someday.
I still love a good debate. I'm a big fan of Emily Wopnick's idea of multi-potentialism. In basic terms, multi-potentialism means you don't just have to pick one interest, hobby, or career path, and stick to it rigidly. You can find fulfilling work that includes the spirit of many other things you enjoy.
Going back to my debate example, I think this is why so many of the articles I write are debunkers. I still love a good debate. I love breaking down the facts and improving a point. So while I may not be a lawyer, I didn't exactly quit debate.
I just took what I loved about it and used it in a way that supported my focus. Wopnick explains his concept early in her TED talk on the topic of one true calling. She says, quote, This question gets asked of us again and again in various forms. At some point, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Goes from being the cute exercise at once was to the thing that keeps us up at night. Why? While this question inspires kids to dream about what they could be, it doesn't inspire them to dream about all they could be, unquote. In fact, this question kind of does the opposite.
We're supposed to pick one major, one career, one role, and one job that defines us. Never mind that this is becoming an increasingly difficult task in our changing job market. It's also a really limiting way to live life. Most of us have a lot of different subjects we're interested in.
We have a lot of different things we want to do. Wopnick's word for this type of person? Multi-potentialite. We usually write off this idea of multi-potentialism with the jack-of-all-trades master of none argument.
In reality, multi-potentialism offers some important strengths. Number one, idea synthesis. Multi-potentialites are able to take ideas from two or more different fields and synthesize them into one innovative idea. Number two, rapid learning.
The skills we learn in one field often help us rapidly learn skills in another field. Number three, adaptability. Multi-potentialites can take on different roles depending on the needs of their clients or their career. My friend era first told me about Wopnick's concepts and it was such a boost to my focus.
It was like someone gave me permission to explore my potential and all the different possibilities and interests in my career. Instead of constantly searching for and trying to define my one true calling, I'm learning to build a career that includes so many different things I'm interested in. This is something I'm still learning to embrace though. In the back of my head, I still hear, I always knew you were a quitter.
And that determines me from wanting to try anything new. It makes me hesitate to adapt, learn new skills, or come up with new ideas. But the more I learn to trust my own definition of success and failure, the more focused I am. When it comes down to it, I don't mind being a failure or a quitter in someone else's eyes if it means being successful in my own.
You've just listened to the post title, The Struggle to Find Career Focus by Chris and Wong of TheWildWong.com And that's another episode down tomorrow's already episode 300, and I have no idea what that's going to entail. See you tomorrow for your optimal life. Oh, wait. Hey, this is Dan from the Optimal Finance Daily Podcast, which is a lot like this show, except more focused on personal finance.
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