Categories
Life

On Fulfillment: Thoughts from the Shower

Kids nowadays – me included – are just so confused with their lives. Everyday they’re faced with gazillions of choices. Sometimes it could be as simple as what to eat, what to wear, what to do on a boring day; other times it could be as complicated as what course to take, which school to study in, where to work for the first time. As people grow older, it gets even more complicated; at one point in everyone’s lives, everybody is faced with The Question: What the fuck am I supposed to do with my life?

Fulfillment. The word started to have meaning only a few years back, when fresh out of college I didn’t have any idea what to do with my life. Based on observation, I’d say confusion is not an uncommon thing these days, and fulfillment (depending perhaps on your definition) is not something that everybody is blessed to have.

I’ve been thinking a bit, and stepping out of the shower, I kinda came up with a simplified framework for people in constant search for fulfillment. According to my bathroom theory, for fulfillment to be fully achieved, a person has to be able to do three things: Learn, Share, and Earn.

LEARN

Once we stop learning from what we are doing, from our lives, we get bored. To learn is to grow; it keeps us young; it keeps that flame burning within us. For me, learning is almost synonymous to adventure –  it expands your knowledge, opens your eyes to things you may have never even thought existed before. Without it, we are like dogs running after our own tails – exhausted, but not getting anywhere.

It’s very basic then, that a person on the road to fulfillment should (continue to) learn, wherever she is in her life.

SHARE

As “beginners” or “newbies”, we usually perceive learning as almost purely a receiving act. This is why as “beginners” in life, kids have brains like sponges; they see the world with new eyes, taking everything around them. Later on, we realize that if we look at it in that manner all the time, at one point we stop learning altogether and find ourselves in a sort of plateau.

At this stage, the only way we could possibly move forward is to be able to share what we know. To give a personal example, I’ve been doing Capoeira for quite a long time – for a couple of years now, actually. But although I will always be a student (as I intend to always remain to be a student of life), I have found that being able to impart the little that I know to others makes me see myself more. Sharing entails doing a bit of self-check; you have to make sure that you are sharing the right things, so you end up looking at yourself and checking if what you’re doing is actually right. In that process, you improve yourself. In the same process, you find out that you also contribute to the improvement of others, thereby increasing your self-worth, increasing your self-confidence, making you feel a little bit more fulfilled.

Now, sharing doesn’t only mean teaching. For a musician, sharing is in the form of performing; for a writer, in the form of creating a novel; for an employee, in the form of being able to contribute to the company he works in. We don’t want to stop with learning. We want to be able to use what we have learned and actually feel that we’re leaving marks along the way.

What makes sharing so important is that it begins a cycle. Once you put your soul into what you share, you want to be able to share more; and to be able to share more, you have to learn more. To share is to learn is to share.

EARN

I have not thought of this until tonight, actually. And this is applicable mostly only to twenty plus-ers – those who are hopefully already done with school and searching for their place in the universe. In a dream world, we should all be happy just being able to learn and share. But in the real world, there has to be something that fuels all of these things. And to be even more real, we all gotta pay our bills. So I’m throwing this into the cycle.

What you know and what you are sharing should be able to put some money in the bag. Because other than putting food on the table, learning and sharing requires time; and time, we seldom realize, is money. Time spent without earning is, in corporate terms, akin to revenue loss. If we don’t earn, we feel dependent; and somehow fulfillment requires that we know we could fend for ourselves.

WHAT I THINK

I know that I am still too young and confused to actually know, but this is what I think: I think that if we find that one (or maybe two or three) thing(s) that we could learn from, share to others, and earn from all at the same time, we become fulfilled. I am, by all means, not there yet, but I find this of importance and actually based my 2012 goals on this framework. Maybe tomorrow when I step out of the shower again, I’ll realize this is all wrong. Or maybe some old fulfilled dude tells me this is all bullshit. But then again, that just makes this a part of my learn-share-learn cycle: I learn, I share, you tell me my flaws as a result of me sharing, I learn again… So that makes at least one part of my whole theory right, right?

And since I’ve got this learn-share-learn cycle started through this blog, I wonder how I can earn from this thing…

So, what do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.