Probably the most life-changing thing to happen to me in the last five years (and that’s pulling from a fairly significant pool) was listening to this podcast a guy named Steve did with Penelope Trunk.
It’s pretty uncomfortable stuff. You see, Steve thought he knew where he was going. He had a dream (ye olde ‘passive income’ dream), and in his mind, that dream was a rock solid goal he was slowly working his way towards.
Enter Penelope.
Over the course of 40 odd excruciating minutes, Penelope asked some hard questions.
Questions like:
How much money do you need to earn to live your dream?
What does a typical ‘living your dream’ day look like?
And Steve was left floundering because he couldn’t answer those questions. And what transpired was, Steve actually had no idea where he was going, which meant he certainly had no idea how to get there.
The reason this podcast was life-changing for me at the time was because I realised I was Steve.
I too thought I knew where I was going. I was heading towards what I though was a highly tangible goal – a goal called ‘freedom’.
Problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to be free of (other than maybe stress). And I certainly had no idea what a day in the life of ‘Kelly’s freedom’ looked like.
So what happened was that I chased after every single ‘opportunity’ that presented itself to me in the hope that one of those opportunities would take me down the path of ‘freedom’.
Suffice to say, all that chasing got me was ‘burnt out’ and ‘very, very sick’. But no ‘freedom’.
And things didn’t change until I became very clear about exactly what I wanted from life:
- What work I really wanted to be doing.
- What I wanted my days to look like.
- How much money I needed to earn to have days that looked like that.
Sometimes it’s nice to meander for a while with no fixed destination. But most of us can only do this for so long before the lack of direction gets to us.
If you’re feeling frustrated at the moment, wishing your feet were on a more definite path, but you’re just not sure how to get there … take a listen to the podcast. And then come back here and tell me what it sparked for you.