What Are You Waiting For

It’s fascinating how long we drag around our baggage. Our baggage becomes an anchor that we should focus on cutting loose. Is your baggage getting in the way of you starting your business? The looming question is, why haven’t you started your BBQ shack, your book, your welding shop, or your cupcake bakery yet? What is your baggage? What are you afraid of? From My Book, The Second Act Entrepreneur

In his book, Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work, Steven Pressfield says, “It’s easier to be a professional in a shadow career than it is to turn toward your true calling.” The payoff of living in the past or remaining stuck thinking about your future (but that’s all you’re doing) is you never have to do your work in the present. We are programmed to think that we need to remain plugged into our job, even if we do not like what we are doing, because of the security the job and the paycheck provide.

Business and employers have the upper hand and control over most of their employees through the money they pay them in the form of wages. The Man (insert your employer) tells you when you must come to work, how long you must work each day, and what time you can go home. The Man tells you how long you have to eat your lunch, and how many hours you can and cannot work this week. It is not a good or bad thing; it is just the way things seem to work when you have a job.

It might look like you have everything you ever wanted, but do you really? Sometimes it’s easier to just keep doing what you’re doing than it is to follow your true calling, which is what you love to do and what energizes you. We buy into the belief that, before we can act, we must receive permission from someone else – a spouse, a parent, a boss, or a figure of authority.

The power of choosing the time in which you come and go to work is much more profound than we are aware. Just try leaving your job at 2:00PM in the afternoon for a few days in a row and see how that works for you. You see, the “Man” is very clever. Human nature plays well into his strategy, as there are busybodies in nearly every workplace environment that happily play time clock police. To be clear here, this is not about working less, or screwing around more, it is merely about being acutely aware of the choices you have or do not have in your current environment. If it’s okay to be like a herd of sheep, and that suits you, then all is well. If that doesn’t suit, then perhaps starting to engineer something different is in order. It is remarkable how quickly the universe starts to answer our calling once we are aware.

The trouble is, you think you have all the time in the world. So, you keep putting off what you want to do until hopefully that fateful day comes when you will suddenly have more time than you did before. The fact of the matter is that you have the same amount of time that everyone else has, including someone who is already actively going after their dream.

Time is ticking by whether you want it to or not. We all have the same 24 hours every day. At the end of the day, you don’t regret what you did do, you regret what you didn’t do.

One writer I know churned out many articles every day for a property management trade newspaper, but it wasn’t what she wanted to be doing. She wanted to be a screenwriter. One day, her close friend asked her the most important question she’s ever been asked. She queried, “When you’re on your deathbed, are you going to wish you wrote one more property management article, or will you wish that you finished that screenplay you always wanted to write?” She knew the answer. From that point on, she found a little time every day to work on several of her movie ideas. What in the world keeps you in your current situation? What you’re doing must make you feel something. What is the payoff for staying? Maybe you feel important because you are earning a good chunk of change. Or maybe you feel accepted by your peers because of the fancy schmancy title you have. Maybe you’re just trying to keep up with the Joneses, or have bills to pay, or kids in college, or not enough money in the bank. The truth is, if you look into your heart, you know that you want to be an artist, but you chose to become an engineer. It paid more, and your parents (gotta love them) convinced you that it would be the smarter decision. Having a higher paying job helps you buy your home, pay for your kids’ college, and fund your cushy retirement. However, every day you go to your job you ache, because you really would prefer to be painting at your studio.

You might believe that before you can act, you need permission from someone, but again, the truth is that the only one who needs to give you permission to go after what you want is you. You do not need validation from your mother that being a writer, or an artist, is a viable business before you pick up a paintbrush or start writing that book. 

So the below excerpt popped up in my feed, something I used to believe in. Working Hard = Success. 

“Believing that, for the most part, our actions determine our fates in life can only spur us to work harder; and when we see this hard work pay off, our belief in ourselves only grows stronger.”

Except it doesn’t,.…and if your actions are not congruent with what you want out of life, You may well end up 25-45 years into your career, Wondering where the insurance is. You see, We believe The Man that runs the Corporation, but by the very nature of the Corporation, its sole purpose is Money, and they reward those that help create more. We Trade Money for Time,……and that’s OK, as long as we clearly understand the Rules of Engagement. Or, as we talk about in the book, GrowingFREE, The Patterns to Success. But what if your ladder you are climbing is against the wrong building, and you are so focused on believing that  our actions determine our fates in life, and can only spur us to work harder; and when we see this hard work pay off, our belief in ourselves only grows stronger.” 

My direct experience has been, that’s a poor  pattern, Define What You Want First, then engineer a pattern around that, It may or may not include a better job or working harder……………..

 BlogPost GrowingFREE; Small Town Community 

I will be Posting 2-Articles a Week, On Tuesday and Thursday for 4-6 weeks of segments from our first GrowingFREE Pamphlet on Small Town Life and Community. The articles chronicle my own experience, and life examples of how we are living GrowingFREE. We hope you enjoy them! We welcome comments and feedback, Please Like our GrowingFREE facebook Page, We Much Appreciate You! -eric brown

You can Buy our book; GrowingFREE here;

About Eric

Eric is an Entrepreneur, Writer/Published Author, Real Estate Developer, Nomad / OffGrid Practitioner. You can get his book, The Second Act Entrepreneur Here