“The secret to finding your purpose in life was to answer this question in total honesty. What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich? Everything sucks some of the time”
– Mark Manson
Every single pursuit no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamourous it initially seemed comes with its own brand of shit sandwich – its own lousy side effects.
- You just have to decide what sort of suckage you are willing to deal with.
So the question isn’t so much what are you passionate about, the question is what are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work.
“If you want to be an artist but you aren’t willing to see your work rejected hundreds if not thousands of times, then you are done before you start.”
– (Mark Manson)
- ex. If you want to be a hot shot court lawyer but you can stand the 80 hour work weeks.
If you love and want something enough, whatever it is, then you don’t really mind eating the shit sandwich that comes with it.
- If you truly love having babies, then you don’t care about the morning sickness.
- If you truly want to be a minister, then you don’t mind listening to other people’s problems.
- If you truly love performing then you will accept the discomforts and inconveniences of living on the road.
- If you truly want to see the world, you will risk being pick-pocketed on a train.
Re-source: Realize
give actual or physical form to : become fully aware of (something) as a fact; understand clearly
The stereotype about creativity is that it turns people crazy. I disagree. Not expressing creativity turns people crazy.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The gospel of saint Thomas teaches, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.”
- Bring forth what is within you, whether it fails or succeeds.
- Do it whether the final product or souvenir is crap or gold.
- Do it whether the critics love you or hate you, or whether the critics have never heard of you, or perhaps will never hear of you.
- Do it whether people get it or don’t get it.
- It doesn’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be Plato.
- It’s all just an instinct and an experiment, and if greatness should ever happen to stumble upon you, let it catch you hard at work.
People’s attention might be drawn to you for a moment if you succeed or fail spectacularly and publicly for instance, but that attention will soon enough revert right back to where it has always been – on themselves.
- We all spend our 20’s and 30’s trying so hard to be perfect, because we are so worried about what other people will think about us.
- ‘Then we get into our 40’s and 50’s and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us.
- But you won’t be completely free until you reach your 60’s and 70’s when you finally realize this liberating truth – nobody was ever thinking about you anyhow.
- They aren’t, they weren’t, they never were.
- People are mostly just thinking about themselves.
- People don’t have time to think about what you were doing or how well you are doing it, because they are all caught up in their own dramas.
“Big Magic” – Creative Living Beyond Fear – by Elizabeth Gilbert