#010 - The Secret's Secret
One of the trickiest parts of adult life comes early in your twenties.
Eighty percent of the people you've grown up with will lose their soul at that precise moment and if you don't know what's about to hit you, you might lose yours as well. I sure shit almost lost mine. No one will ever tell you about it because it hits everyone the same, so they all figure that's how life goes. But it's not. At least, it doesn't fucking have to. I'm talking about the precarious moment in someone's life where they finish school and become a "productive member of society." It's a terrible time for most kids.
If you've been coached well through the delicate process of education by your parents or whoever your mentor might be, you'll already have something lined up by the time you walk to the podium with a silly robe on and get your diploma. You'll have invested hours in college making contacts and slaving away at internship in order to get a foothold somewhere you’ve dreamed of all your life. That smartest of us (or at least the most fortunate ones) do that. Even then, it might not quite work the way you've intended.
This part of your life is tricky because you stopped being groomed by society and it immediately demands that you occupy a function to help it sustain itself. Not the function you've studied for. Any function. Business planning for a multinational company or wiping shit outside of McDonald's toilet is the same to the outside world.
It doesn't give a shit what you do for as long as you're busting your balls like everyone else and don't you dare complain.
Older people will tell you:
- It's normal for kids to get shit jobs because they don't have experience.
- If you're wiping human feces outside of a McDonald's bathroom, it's somehow your fault for applying there.
- Hard work and a good attitude are the only two virtues that will help you up the social ladder.
All of this is complete horseshit rationalized by people who were run over by adult life and couldn't emotionally real with it.
Here's the Secret. The real one, not the one Rhonda Byrne and Oprah Winfrey are trying to sell you:
The cheat code to living a fulfilling and purposeful professional life is : you have to know what you want to do.
It seems dumb and simplistic, but it isn't. 9 people out of 10 working in an office environment have no idea what they like or even what they're good at. It was the job they got. The best situation they could secure for themselves. More often than not, the tenth person in this office knows exactly who she is, but actualizes herself on nights and weekend. She keeps that financially comfortable job for that purpose exactly or for some other self-evident reason. For example: they have kids to feed.
Young people especially have no fucking idea who they are and what they want. Making them choose a college major or a job before they find an answer to these two question is purely based on an economic imperative. Their parents don't want to keep paying for them and society doesn't have a figuring-yourself-out tax break for adults between 22 and 26. That responsibility is implicitly trusted upon seventeen years old kids and most of them (outside those with very wise and benevolent parents) aren't even aware of it.
In my late teenage years, my self-esteem was too low for me to understand that I was good with words. I understood that I liked writing them and could see myself do it for a living. That was it.
Today, I'm a staff writer for a popular French Canadian media, but my seventeen years old self wasn't aware it was even a possibility. It started dawning on me in my mid-twenties when I stumbled upon Henry Rollins' letters on YouTube. Then David Foster Wallace happen. Then Chuck Klosterman happened, who was a gainfully employed staff writer fore many years. In my early twenties, living on my own and exposing myself to the world on my terms, I had found my way. It would just take many, many years to get there.
If you're reading this and are between 13 and 25 years old, here are my ten commandments to you:
1) Listen to the most fucked up music you can. Discover where you artistic boundaries are.
2) Read authors YOU want to read and not necessarily what's popular or within your age group. Reading is about inner growth, not community.
3) If anything strikes your interest and stimulates you, pursue it relentlessly. Your flame might fade out, but you’ll know how to light and nurture it in the future.
4) Don't let older people tell you that you're too young to understand. If you're too young to understand their point of view, they're too old to understand yours.
5) Try thing only to see how they make you feel. Your emotions are there to guide you on your journey to self-knowledge.
6) There's a different between discipline and excess. Stay out late. Drink it out. Have fun. Get it out of your system while it hurts less to do so.
7) If everyone else tells you it's a bad idea, it doesn't mean that it is. You will know what you're capable of by failing many, many time.
8) Whether you travel or not is up to you. It's not the be all, end all of youth, but never turn down an opportunity because you don't know what you're signing up for.
9) Say yes to something without thinking about it at least once a week. This is how you get involved in new and exciting things.
10) You're allowed to be wrong and you're allowed to run out of passion for something. That's when you know that your path is bound to lead you something else.
I turned 40 last Thursday and I feel the happiest and most accomplished than I've ever been. That's because I know who I am and what I'm good at and that I've committed to making the most of my abilities. The road has been long and winding, but I've met a nice and generous woman sixteen years ago who helped me navigate the ten commandments to self-discovery and I want to give them to you today. I'm surrounded at work with kids who know who they are and what they want to do and you can be like that too.
The road doesn't have to be long and filled with sacrifice, heartbreak, anxiety and depression. Learn who you are and what you want and commit to it. The world will unravel for you. I owe that piece of knowledge to many people, but mostly to Henry Rollins who lit the flame all these years ago.
