Sometimes discovering what kind of work really suits you can be quite a quest. It’s something that American writer, traveler and entrepreneur Scott Dinsmore could relate to. He quit a job in which he wasn’t happy and spent the next four years looking for what did make him happy. It’s a drastic step to take, and not something that everyone could do, but perhaps we can learn something from what Dinsmore discovered about himself.
The first thing Dinsmore did after he quit his job was to talk to people who inspired him. He also read more than 300 books about career and purpose. At a certain point, more and more people came to him with the question: “You quit your job. I don’t like mine anymore either. Can we talk?” With every conversation he had, he asked the following question: “Why are you doing the work that you are doing?” Eighty percent of the people with whom he spoke left their job within the next few months. Dinsmore continued to delve into the issue and devised a step-by-step plan with which you can discover what work suits you, what gives you energy and what makes you happy.
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Surround yourself with passionate people
“There’s a quote by Jim Rohn, and it says: ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with’,” says Dinsmore. It is not motivating to only deal with people who think in impossibilities. If others have the same principles as you, you gain strength from it and things that at first seemed impossible, are suddenly within reach.
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Become a self-expert and understand yourself
“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re never going to find it,” says Dinsmore in his TEDx Talk, How to find and do work you love. “No one is going to do this for us. There’s no major in university on passion and purpose and career. So, it’s on us to figure that out and we need a framework, we need a way to navigate through this. So, the first step of our compass is finding out what our unique strengths are.
What are the things that we wake up loving to do no matter what, whether we’re paid or we’re not paid, the things that people thank us for? And next, what’s our framework or our hierarchy for making decisions? Do we care about the people, our family, health, or is it achievement, success, all this stuff? We have to figure out what it is to make these decisions, so we know what our soul is made of […] Because when we start to put these things together, we can define what success actually means to us.”
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Do the impossible: push your limits
According to Dinsmore, there are two reasons why people don’t do things. 1: We tell ourselves we can’t do them. 2: The people around us tells us we can’t do them. The trick is not to listen to that and to prove to ourselves and the world that we can. Dinsmore advises to start small. For example: If you think you can’t run a mile, prove the contrary and show yourself that you can. By taking small steps like these, and proving yourself and others wrong, you can increase your confidence.
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