Follow your Heart

Everyone asks high school and college students what they want to be when they grow up.  It seems like a valid question right.  The more I think about it though it seems unfair.  I’m “grown up” by a lot of standards and I have a career but that doesn’t mean I’ve got it all figured out or that what I’m doing now is what I’ll be doing until I retire.  In a lot of ways I’m still figuring out in a longer term sense what I want to do career wise.  Maybe it would be better to ask “what do you plan to do next?”  It just seems like a much better question. 

On a related but more personal note, I have been trying to focus my thoughts and think about that same question.  Things are going really well for me and I have a great job that I enjoy but I’m not sure what I plan to do next and what I’d like to do longer term.   Some people may think it’s egotistical to think this way since I am in a comfortable situation now but I believe that we should always be challenging and improving ourselves.  I am working to find the balance between thriving in my current situation and enjoying the present while also making sure that I keep an eye on the bigger picture.  Finding the answers to some of these questions has proved more challenging than expected.  One of my biggest quandaries has been determining whether I throw out an idea because I’m afraid of the risk or if my hesitation is really based in my acknowledgment that some aspect of that idea is not a good fit.  In one of my brainstorms I started doodling some things that I considered relatively unchanging truths about my personality and my interests.  I think starting with these things may help me stay focused on weed out things that are a bad fit as I dig deeper into this puzzle.