The core message is that God created you for a purpose and gave you a unique set of skills and personality so that you could glorify Him in all that you do. It says that you are uniquely you, and if you won't live your life and be yourself, there is no one else in the world that can live your life for you. The world misses out on you.
Reading this book was what made me start blogging again in the first place, and if you read my first entry in this blog, the unrest had already begun. I feel that at present, I am not in a job that lets me do what I was born to do.
I'm a manager. There's a certain prestige that comes with that, and it shows people that I've paid my dues throughout the years and worked to get where I am now. It means I have a responsibility over people, to set directions and strategies. But I'm learning that it's difficult to do so when the directions and strategies you think of are not the same as that of your superior's, who seems to expect you to know exactly what they want and execute accordingly.
I say this because I've spent most of today doing the exercises in the book that are supposed to lead me to that "sweet spot" or reveal to me my S.T.O.R.Y., which stands for Strengths, Topics, Optimal Conditions, Relationships, and Yes!. The book defines the sweet spot as "where what you do (your unique giftedness) intersects with why you do it (making a big deal out of God) and where you do it (every day of your life)." In the exercises that I did, I had to look back at my life and think of times that I felt most accomplished, times that I thought to myself that "This is what I was made to do." Even if it wasn't really part of the exercise, I thought of times that I lost myself in my own world, or times that I felt my heart was just content and I felt that everything was right.
And I realized that I have not felt any of those feelings in this job. Couple that with these lines from the book:
Not every teacher is equipped to be a principal. Not every carpenter has the skill to head a crew. Not every musician should conduct an orchestra. Promotions might promote a person right out of his or her sweet spot. For the love of more, we might lose our purpose.
Reading this book has been making me realize that I think I am ready to take a step back from this career. People are always talking about moving on and moving up, and the logical progression from manager would be an AVP or something. But I am realizing that I would be willing to step back into the ranks and give up a managerial post if it means that I will be able to do what I was always meant to do. If it means that I will be happy.
I think that I have always been a writer, and God made me that way. That I was made to tell stories, to meet people and learn from them and share things about them. I was made to encourage and inspire people, maybe through the written word. What has always stopped me from pursuing it is the belief that it doesn't pay to be a writer. That writers don't earn enough to support families and build futures.
And so I buried that skill and went off-tangent. I took a PR job that required me to write a little and explore other mediums more. The time that we did a little restructuring and I had to write all the press releases for all the magazines, I think I was happiest then. But we didn't stick with that structure because we worried about the career growth in that setup-- it didn't create well-rounded PR practitioners, only good PR writers.
I honestly haven't written anything of value in years. Maybe decades. I haven't written one short story, one poem, since college. Every time I have an idea in my head, I squash it like a bug, thinking it's stupid and no one would want to read it. As a result, I have begun to doubt my own talent. Even now, as a little voice in my head says, "Writers can get paid well now, look at all those bloggers." I think to myself, "But who would want to read my blog? Who would want to trust my opinions?"
I don't know if it was God's plan that out of all the DVDs I could've watched this morning, it was Ruby Sparks. It was about a writer who started writing about a girl he dreamt of, and then one day, she became a real person. She could do anything he wanted her to do because he would just write it, and it would happen. He wanted her to speak French? He just had to write "Ruby speaks fluent French" and voila! She did! But it became all twisted when he started writing her in order to suit his needs, and she stopped becoming her own person. She was no longer the Ruby that he fell in love with in his dreams. It got me to thinking that it only worked when he created her out of love, not selfishness. It was only through a selfless act in the end that he found his way back to her.
And maybe that's what I have to do as well, to just write out of love, not because of an audience. To try to rediscover the things that I love and write about them, no matter how mundane they may seem to other people. Maybe now that I have an inkling of what it is I'm supposed to be doing with my life, things will begin to make sense again.
All I know is that I may have been placed in this job for a reason --to learn something about myself, to become stronger, to learn to deal with difficult people who don't care about you as a person and only about the job you do-- but I was definitely not meant to be here for a long time. It's time to get ready for the next adventure.
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