This is a YouTube video titled "Marie Forleo Talks About Taking an Informed Approach to Life" from July 25, 2018. It features a conversation between Ask AI Mark and Marie Forleo discussing the realities of work, the importance of perseverance even in jobs one may not love, and strategies for finding clarity and engagement in one's career path through active involvement rather than just thought.
All right, let's talk about the job thing a little more. So, you know, we all had jobs that we don't like. And it may seem like they're not leading you to the things you want to do. So how can those experiences help us reframe our view around not living our passion?
Yeah, well I think for most of us, the vast majority of us find ourselves at some point in our life, for many points in our life in a position where we don't necessarily love what we do every day. And I do want to, just before we dig deeper into that, just to kind of set some context, even though I really do love what I do, it's not all daisies and rainbows and unicorns. There's a lot of parts of my job that are like grunt work.
You're not just dancing on your marimba.
No, I am not. And it's like, sometimes you're like, well, let's, but how do you do what you do? I'm like, honestly, I could take a picture of myself with a messy bun in sweatpants, maybe not have showered in two days, Typing away at the computer, and that's how most of the magic happens. You see the show, but you don't see all the grunt work underneath that we're doing. That's true. So just for anyone who's like, oh.
I don't love what I do, just.
Know that even when you do love.
What you do, you don't always love what you do.
You gotta put your ass in the chair sometimes. A lot of the time. When you rather go watch TV. A lot of the times, we are living in a very strange world where only what we get to see are the highlight reels and the, you know, the feeds full of filtered photos. That's not reality. That's not reality at all.
So we just need to set that context.
But back to-- I'm so disappointed.
And I thought that, that was my view of you.
No, that's why I take a lot of Instagrams. I'm like, no makeup. Here, you know, it's just because the rest of the stuff, that's a show. That's a show. But when you're in a job that you don't particularly love, first of all, many of us have to do what we need to do in order to someday do what we want to do. So we've got to take care of those bills. We've got to take care of our obligations, of our responsibilities. And, Early in my career, for seven years, I had multiple side gigs between bartending, waiting tables, teaching fitness classes, doing all kinds of things before my business or my confidence, quite frankly, was stable enough to be able to do my thing full time. So I think that we have to be grateful if we have work. If it's a toxic environment, we have to take responsibility that we can find another job and get out of there because spending eight to 12 hours a day in an environment where there's a lot of negativity or there's a lot of stress or there's just people around you, and I'm sure we're gonna talk about the power of environment shortly. Just know that it is possible to extricate yourself from that and to find something better. And I think the more responsibility we take, if we're in a job that's not ideal, okay, we can face that reality, but what might we want to do instead? How can we start taking even small incremental steps?
What are the things we love?
What are the things we love? Are there areas that if money was no object, that we would want to either study about, learn about, engage with. People start either journaling about this, talk about this, find a way to volunteer, any way to get engaged in another, whether it's a career, a job opportunity, work on the weekends, and people are like, work on the week? It's like, no, but if you want- oh yeah.
You might- I joke, I said if somebody wanna retire and work, take off nights and weekends.
Yeah, exactly. But there's a principle I live my life by. Clarity comes from engagement, not thought. So you're not gonna find that dream job by thinking about it necessarily in your mind. You're gonna find it by either taking a class, by going out and contributing, finding a way to do some part-time work, even if for free, interning, doesn't matter how old you are, people need skilled workers. So remember that clarity comes from engagement, not thought. Find some way to get out there and get engaged in another possibility and take those steps. You can do it.
