We all know the feeling. It's Monday morning and as the alarm is silenced by an annoyed slap of the hand or as we are sandwiched between two large sweaty commuters on the 7.15 into the city, we start to fantasize about breaking free from our job cages. Surely humans are not adapted for this beige coloured, hum drum, nine to five existence?
I, like many people, am not suited to being an employee. I have a sharp mind and I tend to use it for thinking, problem solving, reasoning and making decisions. So why would I wish to disengage it and blindly do what I was told to do, in the way I was told to do it, often when I know that whatever I am being asked to do is inefficient, ineffective or just plain wrong!
Minds are creative entities, stifle their creativity at your peril. It kills motivation and turns most people into an autonomous beige army of employees who just go through the motions at work in order to pay their bills in the often forlorn hope that they will live long enough to collect a pension which will enable them to live the lives they really wanted to live all along.
So why are we not all rebelling like mad and breaking free from our employment straight jackets? Our creative minds are longing for us to do just that but unfortunately our creative minds have soft, melodic, quiet little voices whereas our reasoning, planning, logical minds loudly shout out warnings about all the bad things that could happen if we dared to take the risk. I am afraid we can blame evolution for this it is natures way of ensuring that we play things safe in order to survive.
On the other hand we can use reason and logic to argue for the other side and give creativity a voice. More and more I am hearing about people who have spent the majority of their lives in the beige army waiting to be demobbed so that they can begin their lives, follow their dreams or spend time with their families, but they never make it. They become ill, or their partners become ill, or their pensions are not quite what they expected or sometimes they just die in service and they don't even get a long service medal.
So next time you get the urge to break free and your logical mind shouts out all the reasons why you shouldn't, shout back and play it at its own game, use logic to win the argument.
One life is all we have, do we really want to live most of it wishing we were somewhere else doing something else and gambling that we will live long enough and be fit enough to get there in the end or do we take the plunge and enjoy our lives NOW? What have we really got to lose? Money? We can all live with less and still be happier. I once advised my daughter to look for another job as she was not being paid enough, she said "I have enough for my needs and I love my job, it makes me happy. I would rather do something I love and get paid little than do something I hate and get paid a lot". She has it spot on right. No one is guaranteed a tomorrow so we need to make sure that we enjoy today. Carpe dium.
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