Have you ever met someone who’s always known what they wanted to do?
They were 5 years old and sure they’d be a writer or a nurse or an engineer, went and did exactly that, and are still doing it to this day? You probably have.
And while those people didn’t set out to make the rest of us feel bad … it sort of happens inadvertently, doesn’t it?
Liz Gilbert (the author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic) calls these people “jackhammers.” As in, they drill down with mega-focus on one thing that they’re really passionate about and they hammer away at it forever. She’s a self-admitted jackhammer, herself, when it comes to being a writer.
She gave a talk a few years ago (definitely worth a listen) about how she mistakenly assumed that everyone was like this. Not only did she realize that she was dead wrong, but she had no idea how badly non-jackhammers often feel about themselves.
There are a whole lot of us who think there must be something wrong if we don’t have an all-consuming passion that we’re mega-focused on for our entire lives.
We feel like there’s something they (the jackhammers) understand that we haven’t figured out yet. And we can spend years (if not decades) feeling frustrated and hopeless about our search for an all-consuming passion … but never finding it.
But as it turns out, jackhammers are actually really rare. Liz concluded, and I totally agree, that maybe 5% of the population fits the jackhammer bill. The rest of us? We’re something else entirely, and it’s nothing to feel dejected about. In fact, it’s arguably even more fascinating.
IF YOU LIKED THIS YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO…
Side Chat: How to figure out what to do with your life (June 2018)
Bonus Book Club! Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (June 2018)
Finding a dream job after years of searching with Teanca Shepherd (September 2018)
Treating life like a magical scavenger hunt with Francisca Hernandez (November 2018)
Getting what you want, then losing it with Sara Griffin (June 2019)
LINKS
Liz Gilbert’s Super Soul Talk: The Flight of the Hummingbird
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