Majoring in Undecided?

Majoring in Undecided? In six minutes, let’s first Decide your Dream.

I had an unusual reaction to some students who shared how inspired they were and how super relaxed I seemed on stage …
I got depressed for a bit.
Depressed because I realized how late in life I chose to do something that made both me and other people smile 🙂

See until age 9 I knew exactly who I was and mostly what I was gonna do with my life, you know, some combination of music videos and stories and unnecessary noises .. and inventions – yeah.
But from ages 9 through 35 (and that’s 26 years now I’m 43 years old) I spent most of that time running away from who God made me to be because I didn’t think that was valuable enough.

That … turned out to be a very Expensive Experiment.

A lot of us are brought up with the idea that there’s a specific prescribed path to follow in life especially in education for anybody that wants to make a decent living one day.

You need to pursue a career in:

1. a field that’s already proven to be a moneymaker, or
2. at least a hot new field that’s guaranteed to be making money by the time you graduate from college …

So up the ladder you go, rung by prescribed rung and along the way many of us are encouraged to discard our dreams and passions because you know these are too risky and not monetizable – but you can still keep these as hobbies they’ll tell you 🙂

yeah

You actually can monetize your dreams.

The question, it’s not whether you can, the question actually is whether you’ll be monetizing them for someone – other than you!

After I decided that all my childhood dreams were childish and in need of some discarding I went on a rampage throughout college.  I tried five or six different majors and then the workforce trying to learn and do everything that other people thought were valuable.

You know I sometimes still did my music videos, sometimes wrote my stories, sometimes inspired folks with my crazy inventions but those were on the side.  Those were valuable enough only as hobbies.  So job after job I woke up 18 jobs later to recognize a very unsettling pattern.

I’d worked in academia, the corporate scene, startup scene, the nonprofit scene … The things I was good at as a kid, the things I had been passionate about, that made me smile, that made others smile – those I’d put on the side to make money …

But in every single place I’d worked, the things that got me the most smiles, the most praise and awards were for these very same things: my creative videos, my multimedia, mobile apps, my commercial script writing, acting, singing, my emotional intelligence … my communication skills and collaboration –

I had monetized my dream for everybody else.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that by the way if you’re consciously aware that that’s what’s happening it’s okay it’s okay to monetize your dream for someone else if you’re okay with it!

What’s not okay is being oblivious to your UNIQUE personal value.

What’s not okay is thinking that your passions and your dreams are not, in and of themselves, valuable enough to make money.

Someone else will definitely find yours valuable and use them .. if you don’t

So here’s a little exercise:

1. Look back across all the jobs you’ve had, paid or unpaid.  The point here is to think about times where you have given people value.  Your time your talents are valuable.
2. OK, which activities do you recall doing at these jobs where you brought the most smiles to other people?
3. And now, which ones brought you the most smiles?
4. Where do those two worlds intersect? Where your efforts give you and others the most smiles.
5. What things can you start doing today to spend more time at this intersection?
6. Here’s a little hint: Which activities take you away from this intersection?
7. And how many of these can you safely stop doing?

If this sounds silly, if this sounds really simple, it’s because it is guys.  But we we live in this distraction-rich clickety-click-keep-moving-forward world and ignore-where-we-came-from world and not many of us stop long enough to think about this – I woke up just eight years ago but I’m really glad I did because I’m really excited!  I’m excited as heck to wake up these days!  I can’t say I’ve ever felt this way about any other job I’ve had in the past 43 years!  This really isn’t a job to me.

So if you find yourself still majoring in undecided like I was back then,  Decide your Dream, instead!

That’s it for today.  Thanks for watching or listening or reading.  As always tag a friend, share some hope, see you soon.

Until then, I’m Rene Rafael and thanks for traveling with me.

Hey, which path should we take?

Over here?

[grunts]

Yeah?  Ah-right!