Friday, January 16, 2015

Do we know what we want to achieve in life?

Do we really know what we want to really achieve in life? Probably No? and to me that's the beauty of life. Discovering ourselves, our passion and learning new things about ourselves is what probably makes life more interesting than setting the target and running after that.


As kids we were often asked this question. The answers differed as we grew in age from bus driver to postman to fireman to air hostess to PT Usha to settle in US and what not. It all depended on what fascinated us at that point. I really hope that today's youth wants to join ISRO after our greatest success story of MOM. Even now when into a career, we still keep changing the stuff that we do. Reasons could be boredom, compulsion, finding something more interesting or pure lethargy or anything else that I could think of.

I myself have so many ideas about what I want to do. Hundreds of those ranging from be a writer, be a musician, get into an arty crafty thing, be a teacher, be a technologist, an enterprise architect, an Agilist, a great speaker and many more things professionally, and be a great mother, daughter, wife, friend, colleague, mentor, a person with integrity, humility, courage, social worker and so on personally.

I just see the list changing all the time. I had never thought that I may participate in marathon, even if it's a very short distance like 6 km, or learn Quilling in turn helping my daughter win greeting card/bookmark competition. But I found those interesting and ended up doing that in my life! Not sure what new things I may stumble across, find interesting and put efforts to achieve those.

I read that the new generation may have as many as 17 different distinct careers in their life. I find it extremely interesting phenomenon when people change their careers completely. A friend from my engineering college got into TV serials completely, and we hear so many stories of people leaving their plush jobs for the sake of contributing back to society.

It's also interesting to see people finding new things in their profession and achieving excellence there. Even at this age Amitabh Bachchan is able to find challenging work and deliver awesome performances. I am in the awe of Dr. V who after retirement founded the Arvind Eye Clinic, the McDonalds of Eye Care. I guess these guys found their passion or purpose of their life and have jumped into it. In general what we want to achieve could lie anywhere in between "Giving my two cents" to "Making a dent in the Universe".


On a lighter note, I wonder what is it that Sachin Tendulkar would want to do now that he has accomplished so much and retiring at such young age!

Here's a wish that the journey of finding what we want to achieve and then achieving it in itself becomes thoroughly enjoyable at every point in life for each one of us, and we get opportunity to reinvent ourselves all the time, or at least sometimes! Amen!

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