Most people I know smile when they think about infancy periods and have nice words to the family and friends that were part of such special period. Even those who had troubled infancies found mentors that significantly improve their lives, in a unconditional and generous way. In short, we all are experiencing, in different amounts what to receive love means.
Despite this, when we grow up, we are not clear what can we give for gratitute, or how can we express our gifts, if we even have at all.
We grow and learn the norms and behaviors to navigate through society, but we spent little time exploring our gifts. Our classes are standardized in their content, and heavily rely on memory and some type of intelligences, leaving many dimensions of the human condition untouched, archived or even worse denied as valuable.
As generations pass by, we suffer the education inflation, where more and more titles are required for being employable, a luxury condition in the age of automation. We look desperately at what is required in the labor market, matching our interests with professions. We rarely talk about passion, but rather interest, a very ineffective approach for relationships, but somehow the rule in gift expression. It seems an outlier condition to have a vocation or knowing clearly what our profession looks like: a few doctors, teachers, researchers and athletes were "gifted", the other majority must resign and join the industrial machine.
This worked for a period of time, and it definitely contribute to make some countries more productive and more abundant in material terms, but as we approach limits to grow, and more and more jobs are automated, we need to reconsider an alternative path to find our gifts and have a more genuine and attractive vision of work.
Economists treat work as a sacrifice, disutility, a mere means for making a living and paying the bills. That could hold true for extremely repetitive and unpleasant jobs, but many would be with me in saying that purpose, connection and being part of a bigger mission are more and more important drivers to commit to a job position. In fact, we are having a harder time sticking to a job that is meaningless, soul sucking or just damaging society, whatever the pay and individual safety it could offer.
There is an inner voice telling us that we are more that simple numbers trading eight hours a day per a salary. We are unique individuals, we unique dreams and skills, and there must be a meaningful reason, on top of paying the bills, to accept the labor contract.
To be honest, I am wondering how many of us really step up and choice our inner voice I choose based on purpose and love, and not of safety and reward. I am no exception.
The train of the workplace goes fast and waits no one and unplugging the cable of our working connections to take our own path is scary, like anything in life. Probably is not a good idea to jump of with a blurry backlog of ideas with little knowledge, and only big headlines and cumbersome missions. Maybe is better to use design thinking and prototyping our life, testing in a "fail-fast" modus our dreams, or we can, in a gradient fashion, converge to our gifts. That sounds realistic and effective to me, and I can proudly share, that I am fully in that journey.
Despite of being told, with or without bad intention, that we may not excel in anything, there is no reason to give up and follow blindly the "market", overseeing the gifts that we are not even aware of having or being able to create. Being the best, is not being gifted, it is just a relative measure, full of competitive brainwashing and zero-sum gaming. Achieving excellence requires minimum skill, attraction and a lot of training. I believe that although being the best take too much of randomness and external factors, being great heavily depends on the individual. An example for mountain athletics could explain that: around 8 years ago I started mountain/trail running, and although it feels like the best sport in the world from day 1, I am a very different athlete now. Not only I can run longer, faster and with less injury risk, but I excel at the sport, sharing my experience and helping others now. The same applies to environmental science, after 4 years of reading the topic I feel conformable to summarize the issues and solutions with significant science backup. I was not born or gifted for trail running or environmental sciences, but I thrive through thousands of small steps towards mastery.
The journey to realize our gift, start in our mind, touch our heart, and expand to others if we put the necessary work.
If you do not consider yourself particularly gifted is not your fault, we grown up in a standardized education that makes most of us useful and a few exceptional, but you have the power to design your craft and build your gifts from the inside out. You need to select well, something that excites you, that match minimally your skillset and are accessible (cheap, close and available). After thousands of hours working on it you will become the gifted person, that your school fail to find.
Happiness seem to be our ultimate goal, and this is deeply affected to the quality of our connections. I cannot think of a better way to connect with people and the world that sharing and giving our gifts, in a noncompetitive environment, crafting our dreams for purpose, leaving status and comparative bias aside.
“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that really isn’t you, so you can be who were meant to be in the first place.” Paulo Coelho
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