Childhood dreams and goals may start your new life
It sure would be wonderful if you could spend every day doing whatever you really want and really enjoy? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up each day and do something that makes you truly happy? How would you feel knowing that a life such as this is possible for you?
While it sounds like a sales pitch, to me at least, it is true that some people who do not have as much going for them as you or I do, wake up and really enjoy each and every day. What makes it even more impressive is they are nicely rewarded for doing what they love.
What separates you from them? Not much really, life balance and lifestyle, and childhood goals. However if you choose to follow your current career path there is nothing keeping you from success. Of course individual success depends on how you choose to judge success.
Ingrained success criteria is a big limiter in our quest of finding perfect life we wish we had. We want our life to be satisfying and full, although our options seem to be slim indeed. This creates conflict between our wants and our wants. We want to be able to do what we enjoy doing. We also want to become wealthy while we are at it.
What would happen if the success criteria were redefined? What if you could do whatever you always wanted to do, whether that is tending cattle on an open range, or owning your own candy store that specializes in fruit shaped ice cream? What would your criteria for success be then?
It is in the little things in life we get mired up in. As children when we are asked what we want to be when we grow up, we learn quickly what we declare is not usually the response the asker is looking for. We allow ourselves be talked into a group think measure of success, instead of allowing ourself to pursue our real dreams, and define success in ways that are meaningful to us.
We start modifying our answers when asked what we want to be. Instead of wanting to be a clown, or the world’s best cat herder, we now utter we want to be a banker, lawyer, or perhaps doctor. We enjoy those temporary feelings of being approved of by adults. We start forgetting other personal, conceptions of what we really want to do with our life.
This is a multi generational problem. It was an show stopper for our parents who mainly settled for mediocre adult lives, for us as kids, and now as adults. Unless the buck stops with us, lost childhood aspirations will be a part of your children’s life too. Most of us had our childhood goals trampled, and we have almost forgotten them. Children are quick to observe and mimic whatever response really brings approval from you. Are you now willing to continue the cycle of trampling the futures of those who follow by stifling their real life goals?
It is not too late for any of us to start working toward our forgotten goals, to know the intrinsic happiness we never found. Intrinsic happiness is happiness that flows outward from within, not forced emotions of others which let us feel good for a few moments only. There are very few success stories that do not have bold and profound feelings of doing what really makes us happy. Make time to remember the goals you used to have. Start looking for ways to bring those long suppressed goals into your life. Use idle time to nurture your newly rediscovered childhood life goals.
Give them water, sunlight, and a proper venue to grow and flourish. Once you begin to live your real life goals, adapt them into your life. While riches and immense wealth may never happen, you will discover some things are not as important any longer as they once were, as you have found something more rewarding….
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