I'm not saying I have the answer to everything, but there are somethings we have to answer

One of the nice things about getting older for me is that I am slowly working out what I want in life. I am definitely a member of the reaaally slow club, but I am getting there. I would not say slow and steady does the trick, but it works for me. This is pretty much why I don't respond well to personal trainers who scream at me and tell me I am doing things too slowly, or even worse, those who use negative motivations. Dude, would you chill? I know that I am going to get fat if I don't exercise and eat right. 

For me, the hardest thing about working out what I want has been the plethora of choices and more choices that open up more possibilities. It is as if I owe it to myself to pick the best out of those choices, without really knowing what they are or what they entail, or even worse, how suitable they are for me and what I want in the long run. I first identified this problem when I was 18 years old - I was in my second year in college and was struggling to pick a major (or two). The advice I got at the time was this advice: go for the option that leads to more open doors. I guess it was not terrible on the surface, because it bought me time to supposedly figure out what I wanted to do. But it became terrible because of me; instead of using that time to truly figure out what I wanted to do, I ended up doing the most natural thing: procrastinating. I used that time to justify as to why I should not work out what I wanted in life: the most interesting people in this planet do not know what they want right up till they are... err... insert some numbers here. 

Good advice, terrible implementer. Yeap, that was me. 

Another aspect of opening more doors is what is called by FOMO - the Fear Of Missing Out. If my friends are doing X, then if I don't do X, I must be missing out. Unless of course, I am doing Y, which is what everyone wants in the first place anyway, but did not/could not get, so they settled with X. Can anyone say amen to this? Because we don't really talk about this but deep down we wanted to outdo each other all the time. 

Quite fortunately, for me, I don't really struggle with FOMO, purely because I don't really do what my friends did - I did not even study as hard as they did. They see me as "the interesting one", while in fact, I was not trying to be interesting, I was just terribly confused with why I should do what they do when I don't like what they do. That was my benchmark - do I like to do it, or not. If not, let's move on. 

That benchmark was useful on some levels, and it was also terrible on others. Because I subsequently learn that there are things in life that I do not like that I have to do, if only for the mere fact that doing these things would allow me to do the things that I like and actually want to do. After dwelling in this tautology for a while, I realise that maybe it is a good idea to work out what I want to do in this life because it would help to keep me focused and make certain things I don't like doing more bearable. 

If you stumble upon this piece randomly because you don't know what you want in life, then I would say (1) you are normal - a lot of people feel the same way, they are just not as willing to admit it or talk about it; (2) you will benefit from spending time and resources working out what you want in life and then committing yourself to that choice for a while to see if it really is what you want to do; (3) embrace change - really, if you don't like something, change it. You can always reinvent yourself - which is the whole premise of this blog. March to your own drum beat, listen to your head and follow your heart. 

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