Mark Twain said: The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Think a little bit about that. You are reading this, so you are 50% there already! I deal with a lot of people, yet, very few of them actually do what they want to do, and a very large percentage have no idea what they want to do.

Yet, all of us was given certain talents, we have certain interests, things that we read about a lot, and things that we like doing! And still a lot of people are stuck in a 9-5 job that they absolutely hate, 8 hours a day, 1/3 of your day (not taking in consideration travelling and finishing work after hours) that are wasted. And the chances are that you are going to do this for the rest of your life? That just doesn’t sound right to me. Why waste your talents? Why be grumpy about your job? Do you also have the stomach wrenching fear on a Sunday night that you have to go back to work the next day? I use to have it. Until I discovered what I want to do in life that is.


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Let’s say you know what you want to do.

You don’t have to resign from your work in the next 24 hours, you can start on a part time basis, many people have two jobs. You can start reading about your passion, think about it, put things in place, get advise from other people in the same field. Maybe get a job and work for somebody in that specific field to pick up experience until you go out on your own.

Let’s say you don’t know what to do.

What do you LIKE doing? You can make money with anything. Here is SA we have a guy called Jan Scannell. The people in SA call him Jan Braai. He (like a lot of SA men) likes to braai (barbecue). He makes a living from braai. This is not something that I heard somebody make money out of. Yet, this guy started out, he now has a  TV series, has a few cookbooks that his selling (I have one and cook out of it regularly) and have 42 000 people following him on Facebook. Not to bad for a guy following his passion.

Start off by thinking what is your talents, what are you good at at your current job, what is the things that you read about, what kind of movies do you like watching? And pursue that. Start THINKING about your life and stop just going through it.

A couple of ideas

  • Sometimes it is not a bad thing to be in a certain job until you start doing what you want to do. My main income is as a wedding photographer. I wasn’t always one. But my previous jobs that I had prepared me for what I’m doing now, it taught me more about marketing, dealing with people and become the person that I need to be to be a successful wedding photographer. I liked photography as a hobby, and I like watching romantic movies, that’s how I decided to be a wedding photographer.
  • There will be hard times initially. Everything worth doing takes a certain amount of sacrifice. Everything has a price. Success and happiness as well. Theodore Rooseveldt said: “There has never yet been a man in our history that led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering”
  • There is an old Chinese proverb: “A thousand mile journey start with a single step.”Start planning and executing your plan. Today!
  • Rather have a fear of failure, than a fear of regret later on in your life.
  • You are never to young or to old to start doing what you want to do. Ray Kroc started the Mc Donalds chain when he was 59 and Mark Zuckerburg started Facebook when he was 20. He was a billionaire at 23 and is now the 14th richest man in the world.

Lastly, you have only one life to life, start living it! Good luck.

JC Crafford