This is me!

How do you change your life in your mid-twenties after years of living with the long unquestioned purpose that what is important is success and proving your smarts?  I could have asked this question, but some other letter writer to Cary Tennis beat me to it today.  Actually, I do not think it is that hard to do, once you shed your fear of failure.

Cary’s answer is that she ought to start channeling her feelings in the place of her thinking and ability to reason.

Also, since this letter writer is a recent college graduate, I think she is probably used to the reward system of school.  You work hard, you do well on a paper or a test, you get a good grade from your professor. You do this under the auspices that it will set you up for success after school, but the workplace does not have the same sort of reward system, and, if you are not interested in your job, there is not an ulterior reward of at least being invested in what you’re doing.  Success in the real world is often awarded more unfairly than we are used to from school, which is why going back to grad school can seem so idyllic.  However, one has to in a sense obey a professor, and I don’t know if there is often a lot of room for creativity and individual self-expression in that environment.  This is why I would encourage the letter writer to challenge herself by shedding the old, somewhat passive feedback system that she knows from school, the system that propels many of us to try to be liked by a teacher. The truth is, being liked is not the key to happiness or success.

I used to believe there was a set of steps that successful people do and that I should try to figure them out and copy them. These steps were at their core based around trying to impress people. Before going to j-school, for instance, I bought the hype that I needed to learn how to blogvideoeditflashprogram, etc. , because that is what everyone was saying I would need to get a job after school  I realized, though, that it is frustrating, after awhile, to only listen to what people think you are supposed to be doing.  It amounts to not trusting yourself and your own whims.  Plus, there is a danger that in our search to prove ourselves to others by following their advice and looking at their paths, as we naturally and inevitably will always do, we can lose…our selves.

So more power to that letter writer for figuring this out about herself now, at a very fortunate age to do so.