Accepting Where You Are

I am certainly one to want to get ahead.  I have a plethora of ideas for making money, creating financial independence, and helping the world, one product at a time.  Yet I also have a job that pays the bills.

Gurus like Larry Winget and Gary Vaynerchuk inspire us to break free of the corporate mold, and start making changes in order to live the lives that we want.  After reading nearly a hundred of these self-help books, I am left with the nagging feeling that these people believe that there are no employers that can provide you with a satisfying job.  In their eyes, you must work for yourself in order to find happiness in what you do.

Although I believe entrepreneurship provides benefits that many traditional jobs do not, such as freedom to make all of the decisions and self-appointed vacations, it can also increase stress levels, tear apart families and create health problems that affect our level of happiness.  I am an entrepreneur myself, and along with the day job, I see both sides of this issue.

Please excuse my oversimplification of the benefits of entrepreneurship vs employee life.  The arguments for both sides are valid yet lengthy, and I am sure that there are plenty of sources that will assist you in choosing what’s best for you.  My subject here is accepting, no matter which path you choose, where you are right now.

Many of us, including myself in the recent past,  spend a lot of time bitching about where we are.  We hate getting up early and leaving our family at 6am. We miss our childrens’ functions due to late meetings, we are too tired to cook dinner after a long day’s work.  After my pity party was over, I decided to make the best of where I was at any particular time and view my world from the perspective of my being exactly where I was supposed to be.

This means doing what you can do, when.  And not feeling guilty about what you didn’t do, unless what you chose to do instead of what you should have done was stupid.

What’s stupid?  Five straight hours of South Park.  Drinking an entire bottle of wine by yourself, leaving a stream of clothes on the floor and dragging yourself to bed.  Hanging out on Facebook and refreshing until you see a comment made on one of your posts.  Those things are stupid, and those places are not where you should be.

This is time wasted, and as we get older, time is exactly the thing we value the most.  So why waste this time?  Even needing to unwind can be productive, if you just want to doodle on a pad and let your mind wander.  That, to me, while perhaps not overtly productive, gives your mind time to stew, to make sense of your crazy life, and, hopefully, turn it into something that will satisfy your temporary need to be–elsewhere.

Sometimes those doodles on the pad are just stick people, and sometimes they turn into ideas that can be useful whether you work inside the home or out–for yourself or for someone else.  And you can see that where you are is exactly where you are supposed to be.