Extraordinary living: practical concerns
I am told very few people like what they do. I am also told that it is within my power to avoid this fate. This is very exciting and very frightening at the same time.
People like to say 'if you found your dream job, you never have to work a day in your life.' Let us assume the elusive dream job is real. In most 'live your dream'-discourse, the dream job has two qualities. Firstly, the chances of successfully maintaining yourself in a desirable fashion is regarded as slim as compared to 'ordinary' career paths. Secondly, dream jobs are extraordinary and require extraordinary talent. In this sense, the choice of actively seeking the intersection of your talent and your passion brings forth a number of very real concerns.
Finding the intersection of passion and talent is really difficult. Seriously. Apart from the self-help section in the local book store you will not find any well-grounded scientific thinking regarding this topic. Not even in positive psychology. Perhaps in applied filosophy. If you find it, let me know.
All we can do is speculate: perhaps you can increase your chances of finding your dream job by trying many different things. This is the only valuable piece of advice I heard so far.
Don't bother with self-testing or career advisors: they are products of the ordinary themselves so by their nature cannot guide you to the extraordinary. Also don't let popular culture guide you too much. I like film noir and neo noir a lot, which led me to contemplate a career as a heavy-drinking, rogue police detective, spending my time with murderers, maniacs and prostitutes. After further inquiry I realized such a life may not be as good as it sounds in reality.
When you find your passion-talent intersection, it is supposed to hit you like boom. What if it never does?
What if you merely suspect you have found your dream occupation? In line with the increased risk of your extraordinary career, you need some serious grit to become successful. Some say the number is 10.000 hours to become one of the best in the world at anything, others say 32.000, depending on the popularity of the matter and perhaps too on inherited limitations. You need a super strong conviction, a deeply wrought sense of purpose to produce the grit required for the task. And then, maybe, you reap the benefits. I don't know about you but I have trouble maintaining focus for a couple of months. And that's when I like the task. We live in a time of instant gratification. Western culture admires grit, but hardly facilitates it.
My old chess master promised me that the game would become increasingly interesting when I achieved deeper levels of understanding. We need to ask ourselves how much time one can reasonably look for purpose and place. Perhaps, like chess, a choice that is good but not perfect at a glance may prove increasingly rewarding as you invest your precious time. Soul search when you still can, but only for a while. Then move on and don't look back too much at the paths untaken.