Why You Will Fail At Your Career

No matter how many times someone tells you that in order to have a rewarding career and success in life you have to follow your passion, you still won’t do it.

We must hear it a lot:

Pursue that thing that fascinates you most and find a way to turn it into a financially feasible business model. Fail, fail, fail, and fail again at what you love until success is the only option.

No matter how many times you tell yourself you would like to do it, you always find a reason not to.

I cannot define all of the reasons you decide not to do it. They’re endless. We become infinitely creative beings in finding excuses and stories to sabotage our own lives and keep us from pursuing something we love. After all, love was never the logical choice, but in the long term it always yields the most fulfilling results.

 Your career is a choice. You always have a choice. There’s much more sacrifice needed in certain choices, but it’s always your choice and yours alone.

This link will take you to a video that highlights all of these points, but I wanted to share them with you and a few of my own notes on each. Here are some of the top excuses we use to justify giving up on a more fulfilling career:

“Those people that have a great career and do what they love are just lucky.”

So you sit around, waiting for luck to strike, and if it strikes you’ll have a great career and if it doesn’t you might have a good career or mediocre career. Congratulations on choosing luck over intentionality.

“Yeah there are people that pursue their passions and turn them into successful careers but those people are geniuses. I’m no genius.”

Knowledge is learned along the way. Success is learned through failure. You can’t do it right until you know how to do it wrong and it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, it simply takes persistent action towards a goal. A genius who never applies themselves will end up in the same boat as everyone else who sat around wishing for a change.

Remove those words from your life. Take the ifs and maybes and turn them into wills. You would if you could? Well, you can, so you should. But…there is no but. There is only can, will, and goodnight.

You haven’t found your passion, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You haven’t identified with it yet, but there’s passion all around us. If you’ve ever smiled, laughed, thought deeply, had a happy moment, or been human, you’ve experienced passion in some form. You just need to focus on it, harness it, and identify it’s roots. When you know what drives you at the core, you’ll know how to make a difference in the world with your passion for your inner purpose.

Your interests are not your passion. Passion is beyond an interest. You may identify 40 different interests before you find one that truly strikes your core.

The video makes the analogy of deciding to marry someone.

You don’t declare infinite love for someone and say “Marry me! You’re…interesting.”

Identifying your interests may be a step in the right direction, but you have to dig deeper to find passion.

You want to be a great friend; a great spouse; a great family member; a great parent…in lieu of a great career…because you can’t do both?

Are you that fearful of your potential that you shield yourself behind your children? So when your child decides their own dreams and professes what they will pursue even though it’s risky and they may fail, what will you tell them?

Or will you take responsibility for your own fears and ultimately come to blame yourself.
OR…will you say:

There’s still time to take action. Identifying these excuses can allow us to see the fault in them and take real responsibility for our lives. Face the fears that hold you back from your dreams and embrace the inevitable failure that leads to a great career.

It all boils down to your destiny.

It’s quite a loaded word.

For many, it’s quite frightening. But perhaps that’s because you haven’t yet pursued your destiny. You haven’t defined it or worked towards it and we fear what we don’t know. The paradox about destiny, though is that it’s self fulfilling and even if we ignore it, it will be chosen for us. Your destiny isn’t going away, so if you truly want a great career you’re going to need to face it…right now.

By the way, your life is your career on a greater scale. To attain the highest and best use of your talents you must fuse your life with your career in a passionate pursuit of a greater good. So will you pursue a great career? Or are you content with missing the opportunity to find your greatest potential?