Easy peasy, squashed lemons everywhere…
So I’m mindlessly scrolling through Facebook as per a normal lockdown day (well when I’m not working, home schooling, cooking endless meals or hopping about to Joe Wicks) and I see a link to an askreddit article entitled: People Discuss What Looks Easy, but Is Really Difficult.
I thought it sounded vaguely interesting, so I clicked through and gave it a read. Honestly, not that interesting however, one of the answers in the list stood out to me:
“Finding a career you’ll want to go to every day that won’t crush your soul.
I went to college, grad school, got a PhD and work in a senior role at a highly coveted company.
I still don’t feel happy.
The one thing I’ve learned after all these years is that happiness is not defined by title or company affiliation or number of letters after your name. My resume won’t be on my tombstone. But in many ways, I’m stuck because of the responsibilities I have now and all the people in my family and my profession I’m accountable to.
I feel like I’ll always be in the pursuit of happiness, rather than enjoying the moment I’m living in.”
That really hit a chord with me because it reminded me of my life before Spinning Plates. I had, what I consider to be, a very ‘normal’ path through life – school, college, university, job, work your way up and create a career… my father used to drill into me a mantra for work ‘you should always earn at least your age’ – which is all well and good but relies on you always looking for the next challenge and next move where you can constantly increase your income.
When you are in that cycle it feels natural and normal, you know where you’re going and why. To be honest, I never one questioned it – until the day I realised how unhappy I was. This blog is not about that moment or the journey I went on to create my business – I’ve covered that before in another blog but it’s to tell you that everyone’s happy comes from a different place and sometimes we don’t realise how unhappy we are until we do something different.
I thought my life was all mapped out, but I was thrown a curve ball (several actually) and now I have never been happier than I am today and I’m grateful for that. If things change for you or if you don’t feel like the things that are easy for everyone else are easy for you then change, you have that right and you have that chance.
Just because we make it look easy doesn’t mean it’s right.