I’ve written earlier about how living one’s best life is in part living a life with purpose. It was truthfully a small paragraph at the end of another post which mostly amounted to applying your talents in support of your calling to serve others in some nebulous manner. A trite piece of advice which commits to almost nothing and leaves you saying “yes, yes, very nice, but how exactly is one supposed to do that?!” An understandable response, dear reader. I beg your indulgence as I did not wish to make a long winded post.
There are some clues in my nebulous statement. The first is understanding and cultivating your talents. The second is understanding your calling, which is probably the trickiest part and the “meat” of this series of posts. The third is service to others. Which can honestly range from your next door neighbors to strangers on the other side of the globe.
Depending on your level of self-esteem, finding and cultivating your talents may be as easy as taking a walk or as difficult as learning to do a 360 flip on a snowboard. Although, those with an inflated sense of self may find reality is a cruel teacher when faced with the truth that one is not as “smart” and “talented” as one first believed. When reality inevitably smacks one in the face, there can be an understandable re-examining. This can lead to questions of whether one really has a talent worthy of cultivating and the temptation to “throw in the towel” or “give up” may soon creep in. It may be better to replace the idea of talents with skills or interests. These may be less daunting to consider and our egos are not as tied up in a skill or interest allowing us to be more honest in our current abilities.
Given that most of the population is on a bell curve for almost any given trait, the best most of us can hope for is slightly above average, maybe, if we are quite lucky, gifted in a certain area. For those of you unfamiliar with the actual definition of gifted when discussing the overall population, it means that a person is above 84% of the population in a given ability. I can assure you dear reader that neither yourself nor me shall find ourselves in that coveted 26%. To be a true “genius”, one must be greater than 98% of the population. Can you truly say, dear reader, that you are better than nearly 8 billion people in anything?
Now the pessimistic reader will most likely be throwing up their hands in defeat at these facts. If one cannot expect greatness why even bother? Should we not leave such things to those who are our betters? Let those with the gifts toil away and leave the rest of us to our petty amusements. If you are one of those, do not despair just yet! As most people are not innately talented in any given area we can free ourselves of a false assumption that people are talented because they are born that way or that we cannot better ourselves. However, talent is often just a skill or interest that someone has built upon with consistent practice and coaching. It is not a matter of “having it or not”, it is more a matter that you are born with inclinations towards certain skills or interests and then in building upon those they become talents.
One does not need to be a child prodigy or the world’s “best whatever” to use talents for a calling. The world famous violinist Joshua Bell is not described as a child prodigy. In fact, he is considered rather unremarkable until his natural inclination towards music was cultivated by his parents and then his teachers when he was an older child. Nor was it the goal for him to become a prodigy of sorts, instead his parents simply wanted him to enjoy the instrument. He became what he is through dedicated practice and excellent coaching. Having access to world class teachers, he became a world class violinist thus shattering any notion that unless a person begins before the age of 5 one can never achieve the greatest heights.
Now, this doesn’t mean that one should expect that you will achieve the greatest heights in any given field or area. The higher one goes the less and less opportunities there are for advancement that is the way of things. Competition becomes more fierce as the field narrows. So focusing overly much on climbing a ladder of sorts is probably not the best use of your time and consideration. The aforementioned example was more to illustrate that one need not begin in early childhood to start cultivating a skill or talent and that you can, through hardwork and dedication, achieve a true talent. Remember the cultivation of the skill is part of the purposeful life not the end of itself.
Not every interest and skill needs to lead to the highest heights. Not every hobby must become a fortune 500 business, not every skill must yield profit. Cannot a thing be simply for yourself? It is nice when one’s talents and purposes yield income, but it is not necessary. There is something in us as humans that longs to simply be – a drive towards something. It may be the creation of art or music; it may be a connection to nature through hiking or fishing; it may be the thrill of pushing yourself physically through a sport. It needs no audience other than ourselves. In the words of Kurt Vonnegurt, “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
So how do we make room for our souls to grow? My general rule of thumb is 10-15 minutes a day. After all, finding an hour or even 30 minutes every day can be challenging. However, it’s almost impossible not to find a spare 10-15 minutes laying around. You certainly scroll on your phone for longer than that here and there in those awkward in between moments where you don’t quite have enough time for longer activities like when you’re waiting on water to boil or you’ve got a few minutes in the morning after you’re done getting ready. Besides, there’s almost certainly some sort of app that you can put on your phone which will allow you to focus on that interest. Perhaps, you can utilize your morning commute to listen to a podcast or audiobook about your given interest area. Maybe you can enroll in an online course, or read textbooks on your phone. Replace your phone habit with your interests and suddenly, you’ve started to develop a talent.
What’s interesting is that oftentimes, I may start a given activity under my “10-15 minute rule” and soon discover that I have spent 20 to 40 minutes on it. Sometimes it’s difficult to muster up the mental energy to do something for 60 minutes or even 30, but once you get going it’s easy to keep going. Just as objects that once in motion stay in motion, so too do we. However, given my busy schedule, there are just as many days where it’s all I can do to find the 10 minutes. Still, by keeping with the 10-15 minutes every day, I stay in the habit of making time to do the interests I actually want to develop. This way the habits don’t slip away among the busyness of life. Sometimes, you have a period of days where it’s all you can do to go to work, make dinner, clean up the house and take care of the basics. It can be so easy to let your good habits slip and let doom scrolling or other distractions take over if you’re trying for those longer stretches of time every day as opposed to those “stolen” in between moments.
Soon, those interests start to muscle in on the parts of your day that aren’t dedicated to other things. It becomes your way of relaxing and instead of reaching for the TV remote you find yourself locking yourself away to be with that thing. There are certainly days when I spend a considerable amount of time playing the violin and have even found myself getting irritated if I haven’t been able to play. It has become part of my self-care routine as important as any other form of relaxation. I cannot tell you the last time I binged watched a show. My time has been consumed by other interests that I am actively trying to develop. Scrolling on my phone has been replaced with learning languages, practicing calligraphy and reading. That isn’t to say I look down my nose at people who watch shows or scroll, I still do those things along with playing video games. It’s that those things are no longer my first “go-to” activities because I’m now focused on skills that I want to improve.
I’m not entirely sure what I am “becoming” just yet. However, I do know that by spending time each day on those things I feel more myself than I have before. What might your own interests yield if given the opportunity to grow?
Budget Bliss: Bucket List 