Passion Play
If you don’t feel uncomfortable, you aren’t growing.
Maybe you’ve heard this before. It’s one of those personal growth axioms that gets passed around the internet in memes, in posts, in comments. It gets said between friends and family members as a way of encouragement and sometimes as a reminder, a sometimes-toxic reminder to keep grinding, to keep digging, to keeping gutting yourself because the only way to become a diamond is to be squished by so much pressure that you metamorphosize into something entirely new.
Find your passion.
This is another one of those ideas that saturates our culture. The underlying premise of it being that all we have to do is find our passion, and with it, we will also find contentment and happiness.
What no one talks about is how torturous it can be to find your passion, to know what it is that you want to do every day, at any given time, and to be kept from it.
-Because of work. Gotta make money some how.
-Because of family. Gotta cook and clean and raise the kids.
-Because of financial restrictions. Gotta have it to spend it.
-Because there’s only so much time in the day. You can have anything, but not everything.
A Tale of Two Cities
Even if you’ve never read this book, you probably know the opening line: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Lately I feel like this is the perfect way to describe reaching for and growing toward your dreams. It’s great. It’s exhilarating. And it’s frustrating as hell. And the only thing that is definitely certain is that you won’t get to where you want to go if you don’t keep on trying to get there.
To those of you who are sharing this rough and rocky ride with me, CHEERS!
Thank you for stopping by!
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The worst thing about growing your own business, doing something you love, is it often takes years and the ups and downs are brutal. But as you said "you won’t get to where you want to go if you don’t keep on trying to get there." is very true. Despite all the setbacks we've been able to re-bound and grow, although the financial side hasn't grown as much as we had hoped. I'll be heading to Kyoto & Kobe for shows in Sept., but I'll miss Niigata unfortunately. Still trying to get my wife to do it though.
Good luck!
PS, the store link keeps taking me to this Ecency page.....
That’s weird about the link. Try this www.thethoughtrepublic.com and let me know if that works.
I can imagine that the ups and downs get brutal. I’m in the midst of some pretty good swings right now emotionally, patience wise, and largely in just being able to imagine a new lifestyle, one that would incorporate the changes that I’m trying to make. It’s definitely a process.
Was that Niigata show already a year ago? Geez …
I can relate. On a larger scale, we are making so many advances, it is a thrilling time to be alive. On the other hand, talk of nuclear weapons does not leave one with a warm and fuzzy feeling.
All I know to do is to keep stepping ahead. IOW keep on keeping on.
Yep. Baby steps. One foot in front of the other. Sometimes one step back. Two steps forward. Sometimes two steps back, one step forward, but always rebounding.
It is a wild time to be alive, and a really strange time to be raising young children. My daughter asked my wife the other day if she would find it hard to live her day-to-day life without LINE, a messaging app like WHATSAPP, and my wife answered no because she would still have access to email, which she used before using LINE. My daughter couldn’t comprehend this.
In the back of my mind I was thinking, it wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t even have email and everyone got by just fine.
The other day I listened to part of Oliver Stone’s recent documentary about America. The arms race he describes over drones and space mastery is pretty terrifying.
It is funny to think that young kids will never know a world without social media. It seems like the importance and influence that social media wields is growing more day by day.
I havent caught that documentary yet, however I did watch him being recently interviewed on the Lex Fridman podcast. Very interesting.
Yeah, it’s weird. It definitely changes everything.
I suppose it might be similar in some ways to the introduction of the TV and commercials in, I’m guessing, the 50s and 60s. It’s always said that the Keeping Up With The Jones’ syndrome came about then. I think social media really doubles and triples that whole complex, along with a number of other things.
I haven’t reached the social media stage with my kids yet, but I struggle with this whole online game culture.
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I can honestly say for myself, that it was never about finding the passion. It could be, but, it also has to be able to support you and your family in a somewhat comfortable lifestyle.
So, if you are working in a place that holds no passion for you, is it wrong to stay? Not necessarily. You can do it on the side until it pays enough to have a hostile takeover of your life. Well, not hostile, but a takeover on the other job.
I had a job I was passionate about, but, had to change direction. In the end, it was a good move. So, sometimes, passion isn't the only thing.
I wholeheartedly agree. Work and hobbies don’t necessarily mix. And doing what you need to do to live a life that is good and comfortable is important. In fact, having a job that you don’t like to do that pays very well, so long as it doesn’t overwhelm you with stress, responsibilities, and feelings of resentment will probably lead to a much happier and more satisfying life than having a job you are passionate about but either barely pays the bills or doesn’t allow you to make ends meet.
When I started this journey, I took a look at my life and asked myself what is it that I want to do? Then I looked at my list and thought about my daily routine and asked myself what on my list of things that I want to do can I start doing right now, every day, even if only for five minutes.
The answer was almost everything on my want to do list. It was very surprising.
Now I do most of the things that I dreamed of doing every day. What I’m struggling with now is that I want to do more of what I want to do, and need to monetize it in some way in order to be able to do more of it. Otherwise, I just have to scale back and be happy with the five minutes a day (or more). I’m at that place of finding the next step, or if we refer to the Robert Frost poem that you always put in your posts, deciding which path to take. It can be a hard place to be at times.
That fork in the road is a really hard place to be. One of the paths continues your journey, the other leads to a path that may or may not open doors for you.
It is interesting to see what we actually chose when given the opportunity.
Monetizing the things on my list of passions was unrealistic, but, having a good job making it easy to enjoy the time I did have. It all came down to me being able to make it all work.
Work-Life Balance, right?
I know that in my life, I’ve often found that the things I thought I wanted, once I had them, weren’t quite what I thought they would be. So I’m not approaching any of this with my rose-colored glasses on.
Honestly, I’d be happy to keep doing exactly what I’m doing with only some small changes. I just want to take the next step and print my work and share it somewhere. For an analogy, I think it might be like being a player who is sitting on the bench and just wants a chance to get in the game.
I know what I need to do. Thanks for commenting and sharing!
Exactly! Sorry I lost sight of this and found it today! Hope all is well with you!
Happy Labor Day. Hehehehe
Well put!
Also... I found this because I can't find you on Discord :)
Could you maybe post an invite for me or something.
And then I visited your store! In the link in this post. You've so got that covered already. Some really great designs there. Honestly. And I'm a t-shirt fundi forever.
<3
Let's try and have that chat soon.
What’s your username and 4 digit number? If you search for me in Discord, you have to type in boxcarblue#5313.
It's not finding you for some reason. But I am a Bot at Discord. I haven't used it very much.
NickyDee#1465
It’s a mystery to me as well. I signed up years ago, but haven’t spent much on it. I think I managed to send you a friend request. Have a look and let me know.