Find your tribe, let your passion come
I never had a ‘career freak out’ at any stage of my life, so it’s hard to empathise with others who do.
The closest I ever came was my time at uni and my time in real estate, where I knew I wasn’t doing the most with my time, wasn’t doing the thing that made me come alive — but I had a vague idea of what that other ‘thing’ was on both occasions.
When I was studying at uni, I knew I should have been doing more filmmaking.
When I was focused on real estate, I had a sense something that exposed me to more diverse fields and sectors, entrepreneurship, or something in education, was what suited me. I felt too pigeon-holed in real estate, it didn’t scratch enough of my interests.
So I never had the ‘I don’t know what I want to do with my life’ freak out. Rather, the times that were lowest for me were when I felt cut-off and alone.
Both at uni and throughout my exclusive real estate years, I just didn’t meet as many of the exciting people that I wanted to be meeting.
You might ask yourself, ‘what do I want to do with my life?’, and my question would be, ‘why do you need to know?’
What did you want to do with your life when you were five years old? Did you worry about it then? No, you didn’t think about it, you just played, you were just yourself, you could just be.
You may think the problem is knowing ‘what you want to do’ as a job or career, but that’s not the problem — the problem is that you feel you need to identify it, which is because, you feel you need to identify. It’s a consequence of a very smart, fancy, and complex society we live in now, with so many labels and categories of people and things — your natural tendency is to see where you fit.
When you have a true tribe and sense of community, you don’t have to ‘identify’ where you fit, who you are, where you rank, and what will become of you. You can just ‘be’ yourself. When everyone there accepts you for who you are, you can do the one thing that modern society makes so difficult… you can just be who you are.
Now then, this dissolves all the anxiety, the insecurity, the searching, because you know that 1) where you are right now is a great place to be, and 2) with a community or tribe, no matter what will come, you will never be alone.
That’s it, as far as I’m concerned. So why doesn’t it happen?
Well, most people don’t have a tribe or community, and they don’t know how to find one. I’m not just talking about a couple of friends that you go to music festivals or nights out with… I’m talking about a tribe or community that ticks and scratches everything you want to explore with you…
Where, if you want to make a podcast, there’s a group for that.
Where, if you decide you want to dive into psychology too, there’s a group for that as well.
And, if you want to check out designing an e-commerce business, you can go hang out with that group too, and scope it out.
All the while, we just want you to feel safe too.
I like to feel we’re building this place for you right now, and it’s called The Constant Student. But, I might be biased, who knows — but that’s your challenge.
To find your tribe, or your community, you have to show others you are interested in things — you need to participate, open Doors, talk about it, let those interests hang from your neck like an advertisement board, “I’M JOE, AND I LIKE FILMS” — you need to shamelessly advertise this to the world and let people know about it.
Ask questions to others, ask where you go to find more people like you — most people like to help, but they can’t help if you don’t ask.
Because if you can just be yourself, you can just try things, lots of things, always bring your best to them, and then passion is just this thing that you wade into, that falls into place, kind of like the sun slowly coming out from behind the cloud.
So find your tribe, let your passion come.
Would this open a Door For Someone You Know?
Remember to share it with them, after all, the best way to Open a Thousand Doors for you is to concentrate on Opening Doors for Others.
