How to find your calling in life

Everything I’ve written below can be ignored, or taken with a pinch of salt, as with all thoughts. My writing is typically less rigid, but the below is what I feel deep down to be true.

You won’t receive / perceive your calling until you’re ready to. It might be in front of your face for years, but if you’re not ready to make sacrifices for it, you won’t get to realise it. Once you open up to / know / admit to / face / uncover your true calling, you’ll be spending the next portion of your life focusing on it. You’ll no longer be in a position where you can consider many different possibilities to choose from. If you’re not ready for that yet, then you won’t get to know what your true calling is.

Just like the right relationship, your calling will be something you feel deep down that you need to be a part of. You’ll be willing to bet everything on it, even your life, because your life is essentially the small amount of time you have to use on this planet until your inevitable death. Mortality is a pain in the rear end, but when you internalise that your time is running out, you’re going to start to focus. And when you’re ready to do that extraordinary thing which is your calling, you’re going to focus on it like a laser, and make any and all necessary sacrifices. You won’t follow your calling because you feel like “you should”, but because you will know deeply that it is a part of who you are. Your calling is the core reason as to why you are alive and here in the now.

When you find your calling, you’ll start cutting those things out of your life which have been distracting you, and holding you back. And when you have just 5 minutes of free time to play with, you won’t find yourself watching some random clickbait youtube video, as there’ll be more important things on your mind. You’re going to be drawn to your special mission like a magnet. It’s going to light your heart on fire, and electrify your brain.

When you realise what your true calling is, weird coincidences start happening; things which could be explained away by a different person as “unusual”, but you’ll know from your own life experience that the likelihood of those different things happening at the same time, during this particular window of opportunity in your life, are pretty much impossible.

For example, you might stay in a hotel and the room number will match something deeply related to the very essence of your calling. Perhaps you’ll overhear random strangers talking about things which are directly related to the work you’ve been tasked with. A very special animal, or thing, or phenomenon will be witnessed (by you or your partner) during the same chunk of time when you feel like a “lightning bolt” of inspiration just penetrated your brain. That lightning bolt will help you realise what it is you’re actually supposed to be doing here on Earth (Hint: It’s probably not your day job).

However, let’s not forget that it feels nice to be ordinary. It feels cozy to just sit back, munch on some crisps, drink some beer, and watch another action movie. It’s going to be easier to do those ordinary things, than to walk the path of your calling. Your calling is going to test your will. You need to be ready for certain people to reject you. You need to be ready to drop a fair chunk of comfortable distractions. You need to accept that your mission might fail, but it is still worth every single second spent on it.

When you’re tired to your core of the ordinary, and are ready to experience something more, you will. You might not be ready to receive / perceive your calling yet because you’re unwilling to drop the things which need to be dropped, reject the people you need to reject, or face the problems which need to be faced before you can start. You basically need a cleared desk first, and: You already know what those things are which need to be changed first.

For me, I initially found my calling as a teenager, but then I buried it under a mountain of excuses for decades. The excuses I made were things like:

* People don’t believe that what I want to do is realistic or even possible, so they’ll look down on me for wasting my time, and essentially “being stupid”.

* I think I need to go to University to work on what I want to do, but I can’t afford to do that.

* I don’t have enough free time to make a meaningful dent in what I want to achieve.

* I’ll probably fail anyway, so I might as well focus on something more realistic.

Well, 2 weeks ago, I wrote myself a letter detailing the strongest reasons as to why the thing I really want to work on (as a part of my true calling) will never work, and why I shouldn’t even try. Then whenever I started thinking about my true passion, I would read that letter again to effectively “shut myself up”. But the letter (quite wonderfully) didn’t work as intended, and I finally saw it for what it really was: A list of weak, crappy excuses to not even try.

Then something unexpected happened. I was trying to write my own little game in GameMaker, and I realised how difficult it was. So I thought that if even this was difficult, why don’t I just focus on doing that thing which I really want to do, and feel passionate about! I then watched some cool motivation videos online, where the common theme seemed to be that people need to ignore the naysayers because what do they know? Then I watched some more videos online related to my true passion, and saw how other people were working on the same types of things I wanted to work on! It filled me with excitement, and then I realised how the things which excite me don’t actually excite everyone else, but just a subset of people, of which I am one. Then something like that “lightning bolt” of inspiration (I mentioned earlier) zapped me as I thought:

“Why do I feel so enthralled watching this particular video (about my calling), when most other people would find it incredibly boring?”, and the answer slapped me in the mind like a wet fish:

“Because that thing which gets you crazy excited is your f***ing calling! It’s your passion man!”

BAM! The memories flooded back, and the excitement I felt as a teenager when I originally found my calling rushed through me. It all swirled around in my mind as I thought to myself that I just can’t waste any more time on excuses. It was finally time for me to work on my calling.

I’m not going to share what my true calling is on this blog today. Despite knowing it and burying it under excuses for decades, it now feels newborn and delicate once again. I’m just not willing to risk subjecting it to other people’s opinions. We should all be warned that there are kind, wonderful people out there who might misguidedly try to shoot down your calling because they believe they can save you from the pain of failure, so don’t give them the opportunity to do so. When you know deep down what that thing is that you need to do, you won’t need the approval of others anyway, so why seek it?

By the way, this blog is a part of my calling, so don’t worry, I’ll still be knocking around on here to write for you :)