Making the most of the Quarter Life Crisis

I am assuming that the twenties are both the suckiest and most amazing time of life in general. I am already over the hill of the mid twenties and thus have major anxiety about making the best use of this time. Instinctively I feel this is the time to lay a firm foundation.

The decade of the 20’s has, so far, given me numerous opportunities for renewal. I hit the reset button, this last time, in a quest retrain my brain and re- educate myself towards happiness and prosperity. It’s a learning expedition of sorts.

Even my world- class education has left much to be desired. Unfortunately I wasn’t trained in financial literacy, finding my strengths and how to develop an appropriate daily regimen.

Ask and you shall receive, they say. Well this week the answers started ‘falling off the shelves’ so to speak. Below are two out of the several useful resources I found:

1) Finding your calling:

Marcus Buckingham is the author of several books based around finding personal strengths. Buckingham’s’ course about discovering your strengths can be found here.

Identifying, and building strengths is the key to finding what you should do with your life. We are trained to identify our weaknesses and improve upon then, when in reality the key to our success and fulfillment lies in our strengths. Working on strengths will also help up improve our weaknesses. Strength training is the first step towards all else falling into place

We often define strengths and weakness based on what we are good at, versus what we aren’t so good at. Yet, we can perform very well at tasks and roles, which are in fact our weaknesses. Strengths should be identified based on how activities make us feel. Activities we are energized by represent our strengths.

Often we chose professions based on weaknesses. Women especially, get stuck in tasks they perform well at since our performance at these tasks please others. We tend to ignore the fact that these activities deplete us. Activities, which drain us, are our weaknesses, even if we are good at them.

This information is incredibly useful for those of us trying to find focus. Finding a niche comes from finding things that energize us, as opposed to things that make money or please others.

Even though I was not raised to work on strengths and neglect weaknesses, I was intuitively inclined to accept this information, since I already have some idea about what my strengths are. However, there is some amount of trepidation attached to being fully honest with yourself about the things that you truly should not be doing, particularly if you do them well.

Also, not focusing on improving upon weaknesses has implications for our career choices. How may times are we tempted to take a great salary, or accept and invitation to an event, that may appear prestigious to the outside, but will ultimately drain our energies and pull us out of alignment with our goals? Aren’t we are trained to pursue opportunities based on how they sound/ the status, rather than making our decisions based on how the day to day activities associated with the job will enrich our lives from the inside out.

I found this resource to be very useful as I set out to redesign my life. In asking myself how I want my life to look in 5/15/ 20 years, I have to consider what I want my daily regimen to look like at each point. Rather than visualizing my life in terms of achievements, at each check- point, I would like my daily regimen to be composed of more strengthening activities and less depleting activities.

 

2) Developing a daily regimen:

Steven Pressfields’ The War of Art,  is the new Holy Scripture. It wasn’t a good idea to start reading this book last night, to help me get to sleep. Needless to say, I am more than half way through, and couldn’t wait to share. Below is a quote from the book of Resistance:

“The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will find towards pursuing it.”

When we find our niche, or that which we are meant to do, Resistance shows up as the constant distraction away from our higher calling. I love the quote above, because it shows that Resistance is strongest when you have found what it is that you are supposed to do. Very often we make excuses for our inability to do our work. We follow Resistance’s misdirection and mistake our lack of discipline as an excuse to ignore a calling. Often, we tell ourselves “if I am really supposed to do this wouldn’t it come naturally?”. In those moments Resistance wins.

The artist is anyone who called by their higher creative function, the painter, the writer, the entrepreneur. The artist must wage a daily battle with Resistance, in order to formulate the habits, which will facilitate her artistry. The artist EARNS inspiration. Inspiration (or genius) only shows up after the artist has done the work.

“Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance.”

All of us have to do the work. But figuring out how to overcome Resistance is a daily battle I struggle with. Developing a regimen that incorporates all the elements I must work on daily, including exercise, self- learning, mediation, completing the daily to do list, is becoming extremely difficult in the face of the never- ending distractions of the modern world.

I consider this an essential book for anyone who intends to create- whether it’s a business or a work of art. I already predict re reading this book several times. I just hope the book doesn’t become a tool for procrastination! More on this to come…