In my moleskin is an outline of how to start my business. I wrote my plan in a coffeeshop during my unemployment last year. It started with finding a job that paid $15/hr that I could work 30 hours a week while launching my business. At the time it seemed unreasonable. Like a dream I would never create. Instead I took a staff accounting job, which I have since quit.
What Was Lacking?
I had desire, I wanted to build something for myself. But I lacked faith in myself and my dreams. Sometimes our biggest obstacle is developing faith in our desires. The path isn’t laid out. Some professions are perfectly laid out. Check this box, get this promotion, climb this ladder, appease that boss, and bingo, you’ve arrived at the top of the profession. Those professions are getting fewer and, for me, are far from invigorating.
Without the typical trajectory grade school to college to nice job, it’s easy to lack faith in our abilities. We were molded to live in a society based on rules and following principles. That’s changing. In order to lead a millennial-fulfilling lifestyle we don’t want to report to bosses and play by their rules. We want to make up our own rules and do things better. The hardest part, at least for me, is finding faith in our abilities to make our own rules.
How I’ve Developed Faith
I have developed faith in myself by putting myself in different, and difficult, positions. It’s easy to stay in your hometown, or your college city, it’s easy to stay at your first job, and it’s easy to stay at higher paying jobs. And I am not bashing any of those decisions. If you’re happy, truly happy, don’t change something that ain’t broke. But a lot of people aren’t happy.
If you aren’t happy in your current situation try building faith in yourself. Put yourself in a situation where you have to make decisions for yourself. Where the only person that matters is you, your happiness, your livelihood, and your way forward. Investing in yourself, through big decisions, helps immensely in personal faith.