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Originally Posted by Fullcrum  Ah, an identity and purpose issue. Interesting.
Do you truly believe this information applies to everyone? I mean, you write to empower all who are touched by your work to grow consciously. Nevertheless, I cannot see a third world farmer, or some pesticide GMO corn grower in Iowa trapped under a pile of loans and credit being able to take this to heart. If all people were living like this...
Who would pick up our garbage? |
I struggled with this topic before quite a bit as well. You're obviously not just talking about picking up garbage. What you're referring to is the fact that there are ways of providing value to people that are exciting, fun, inspiring, etc. and then there are ways of providing value that are crappy. What you're saying is that if everyone just went for all the fun jobs, who would do the crappy jobs right?
There are 2 major points that I learned from this after a lot of thought and real-world examination / testing.
(1) The universe seems to have some kind of infinite organizing principle built into it. Human beings are all made to like complementary things. I've had the privilege of seeing this in groups of higher numbers of people, but I'll give you a much easier example with just two people - my wife and I.
Yesterday I finally took the giant stack of unfiled bills and papers that I've been collecting in a spot in my office for the last year or so and began to separate them into two stacks. One stack is for stuff I need to still go through and take further action on, and the other stack (about 95%) is just stuff that needs to be organized and filed properly.
I absolutely DREAD doing this stuff. I hate accounting crap, I hate filing crap, I hate all stuff related to this boring and repetitive admin crap! As you can see, anytime I even think about it I start swearing and using the word crap a lot, because it's just one of those things in life that I despise.
Now take my wife. She was sitting by the computer, laughing at me because I'm swearing while doing this very simple but repetitive task of going through all the papers. She found it very amusing how I can be the most positive person and have so much patience and stay calm and positive in super highly stressful situations, yet this little pile of papers is driving me nuts. She loves admin, filing and repetitive work. It's fun for her. It's super easy.
See, when people think about all the "fun" jobs and all the "crap" jobs out there, the assumption we make is that all the "fun" jobs are fun for everyone, and that's just not true. Somehow, the universe made all of us in a complementary way just like it made around 50% of us men and 50% of us women so that there would be accountants to do accounting and firemen to stop fires and programmers to program computers etc. and EVERYONE can do FUN stuff if they just align themselves properly.
I know a guy who left a super easy computer job where he could technically spend half his day surfing the web and just hanging out with his friends to work with elderly people taking care of them, and without being rude - literally wiping their butts. A couple of his previous co-workers crack jokes at that once in a while, but he totally enjoys it. He finds a lot of fulfillment form helping another human being...much more than he did working with computers.
It's really weird, but that's just what I've found happens in the world. Any task that needs to be done, there seems to be people out there who are absolutely THRILLED to do it.
I even had a chat one day with a pest control guy who traps rats for a living and this guy was the most passionate guy about rats. He talked to me about rats for like half an hour and about their mating habits and their territorial behavior and he knew all this crap and he was so passionate about it that for a few seconds there I almost wanted to become a pest control guy. I know it sounds weird but just because a job sounds like CRAP to you, it doesn't mean it's CRAP to someone else.
For example, you couldn't pay me enough money to do Scuba diving for a living, but I know a lot of people would love that job. You couldn't pay me enough to be an accountant either.
(2) The second and even more important thing I learned about this topic is this. The universe already is taking care of the job of organizing all of us humans to make sure all the stuff that needs to be done gets done. It's not your job or my job to worry about that stuff.
You just need to focus on figuring out what it is YOU are passionate about, and if that doesn't involve picking up garbage, don't worry about it. Someone else will take care of that. If you're a garbage man now and your passion is video game testing, then go right ahead and become the best video game tester you can be. Don't worry about the garbage... someone will show up to pick it up and love doing it.
These 2 points helped me to understand this. Since this realization, I've encountered a lot of strange people (strange to me), who are passionate and love to do the weirdest things. Things that I would dread doing, but others love it.