One of my favourite parables in the Bible is a story about a master and his servants. The said master was about to go on a journey, and before he left, he gave his servants talents in different proportions. To some, he gave three; to others, he gave one. In a culture like ours, such actions are deemed unfair, and that's precisely what the servant with the one talent felt.
So rather than do anything with the resource he received, he buried it in the ground to protest against his unjust master. When the master returned, the servant was quick to defend his actions with unprintable language, and of course, he got the end of his master’s stick.
This isn’t a story about justice or fairness (not in the context of this post), but one that addresses how we view our abilities in a world filled with exceptional individuals. Most of us like the servant, are angry and ungrateful for the scarce resources we have, and decide to express our discontent by self-sabotaging, complaining, or doing nothing with the opportunities we have.
There is another category of persons I want to address in this post, and fortunately, I fall under this category of persons (so this is by extension an open letter to myself). These are people who do far worse things than be ungrateful. They go about chasing the wrong things because they never feel good enough about the skills or talents they possess. They are always reinventing themselves every two weeks, get excited about a new project only to pursue another the following week.
People ask me most often how I know so much about everything. Well, that is because I have tried almost everything, even semi-difficult things like coding. I have dedicated hours of my life to so many ventures, but I have never really stuck to anything. Creating content is the one exception because i have been doing this activity for almost a decade, but I did drop it last year to chase another pipe dream.
To be fair to me, staying in one place for too long can be a blessing and a curse. It can be a blessing in the sense that it provides you with the stability you need to grow. Also, it can be the reason you regress because you are so comfortable that you disregard the need to grow. The unfortunate thing is that most people, like myself, equate growth with change.
I recently had an epiphany after months of struggling with a business that ruined almost four years of hard work, that I did not need to reinvent myself every two months. Yes, there is room to pick up new interests, but that should never take me off my path as a creator. Rather than chasing trends, I should focus on aligning my skills with the current trends.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to change paths. Some people have done so and been successful. However, I believe there is demand for any creative endeavour. The issue is finding those who want your skill and services. Most people opt for industries where demand is relatively high so they don’t have to undergo the stress of finding their audience or marketing their skills but that is inevitably at some point because every industry gets saturated and finding new business or customer become more difficult over time. It is the natural progression of things.
It is easy to prosper, innovate and solves problems doing the thing you enjoy. There will also be someone willing to pay for your service, the issue is positioning yourself in their line of sight. I see this happen with Keith Lee’s food review. A struggling restaurant starts doing well after he reviews its menu. The issue was never the quality of their service but the fact that people did not they existed. This might be due to poor marketing, location, etc So right now the most important question is: are you doing the right thing the wrong way? If so how do you change? It is never a simple answer but it would surely set you on the right path.
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