Every person is born with a seed — a unique and irreducible spark of genius.
In our youth, we feel this instinctively. We sense, with a confidence that needs no justification, that there is some special significance to our character, a richness of expression that only we can give to the world.
This feeling — that there is some power in you, peculiar and incommunicable, that belongs to no one else — is the signature of your soul.
Our psychological health depends upon answering this intuition, on growing into what only we can become.
The self is not an empty canvas to decorate with arbitrary preferences, it’s a seed with a specific potential, and there is a right way for it to unfold.
We are organisms with intrinsic growth tendencies, with a drive toward wholeness and a full development of our powers. Just as an acorn tends toward becoming an oak, so too does each human tend toward becoming an original self.
We are all born originals — why is it that so many of us die copies?
Most people, however, never learn how to water the seed of their peculiar genius.
Instead of tending to their inner flame, they are swept along by the currents of convention, expectation and accident. They live out the script handed to them by society: career, marriage, family, retirement.
“The people of England think themselves free but they choose what is customary in preference to their inclination, until it does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary.”
(John Stuart Mill)
A quiet dullness begins to hover over adulthood. Many begin to wonder why they feel so estranged from themselves, so low in spirit.
The English poet, Edward Young, was struck by an observation:
“We are all born originals — why is it that so many of us die copies?”
That question haunted me when I first read it, it should haunt you too. How does a creature capable of such novelty and imagination resign itself to imitation and conformity?
If I asked you, “Who was the richest person in 1870?” or “Who was the governor of New York in 1940?”, not only would you not know, you would not care; because you know that wealth and position are hollow markers of value.
But when we encounter the virtue of St. Francis, the improvisations of John Coltrane, the mystical verse of Rumi, the courage of Malcolm X, the wit of Oscar Wilde, the dance of Martha Graham, our conscience stands at attention. We recognize the unmistakable stamp of originality. These are lives in which their inner flame was guarded, nourished and allowed to blaze.
Despite the hurried lives we lead, despite the status games we play, we know what matters. We know what kind of life awakens our admiration.
Yet, for some reason, we rush to occupy roles that anyone could fill. We slouch toward interchangeability.
My hope is that you will come alive to the miraculous originality that is your life.
If you don’t consecrate your life, if you don’t defend the originality and richness of your expression, you’re inviting the world and your lower self to defile it.
Identify your zone of interest
Look inward. Look into your past. What moves and excites you at the deepest levels, and across time? Where do you feel that spark of excitement or eagerness about life — the sense that this is worth your time on earth? What pulls at you from the inside?
You find your calling by identifying what moves and excites you, what holds your interest across time, and living in that space.
“Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it — there life becomes genuinely significant. Wherever this eagerness is, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.”
(William James)
Your inner excitement toward a domain is nothing less than the fingerprint of your soul. It’s what breathes life into your identity. That raw emotional energy is your infallible guide.
Only when you have some idea of that can you properly answer the question — How should I live my life?
“Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart. Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”
(Rumi)
Get rid of the fear of choosing the wrong path, there are no wrong paths, only inauthentic ones (i.e. paths chosen for money, vanity, social status).
There are many routes to one’s calling.
The greatest lives didn’t wake up one morning with a burning passion for painting, or coding, or astrophysics. What they felt was an attraction to a zone of interest — a domain that spoke to them, that held their curiosity, that rewarded their attention over time.
For some, that zone is being in nature. For others, it’s working with their hands, storytelling, caring for people, studying history, or solving puzzles. Your task is to notice the domain, not the finished job description.
Consider Linus Pauling, one of only five people in history to win two Nobel Prizes, who recalled:
“I don’t think I ever sat down and asked myself, ‘What am I going to do in life?’ I just went ahead doing what I liked to do… When I was eleven, I began collecting insects and reading books in entomology. When I was twelve, I made an effort to collect minerals… I read books on mineralogy, and copied tables of properties… And then when I was thirteen I became interested in chemistry…”
Decades later, still working at age 89, he explains that:
“The question, ‘What is the most important thing that I have to do?’ doesn’t seem to me the right question… I work on problems in pure science, just to please me, by giving me the pleasure of thinking that I’ve solved a problem, or sometimes to satisfy my curiosity.”
A calling, therefore, emerges slowly, through engagement with a zone of interest that holds your curiosity and eagerness.
I myself wandered widely, but always within one broad ecosystem: the intellectual life. I studied indiscriminately — 19th-century American wisdom literature, Christian and Islamic spirituality, Aristotelian philosophy, sociology, humanistic psychology.
I tried research writing, content marketing, ghostwriting, tutoring, creative writing, essay writing and then teaching. I went where my interest was genuine and where the work was energizing.
This exploratory route is the most common route to one’s calling.
If you want meaning, you have to stay
“People need to take time to develop a passion. The research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery — not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of good life design, not the cause. Most people do not have that one thing that they are passionate about — that singular motivator that drives all of their life decisions and infuses every waking moment with a sense of purpose and meaning. If you’ve found that… we salute you… In truth, most people are passionate about many different things, and the only way to know what they want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what really resonates with them.”
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford Educators
So just choose a domain that holds your curiosity and stay with it.
Nothing profound has ever come from a hit-and-run life. If you want deep meaning, you have to stay.
You have to stay on a path for a while. Whether that’s a craft, a discipline, a community, a job. You become a master by first being a servant.
Don’t wait for motivation or the perfect conditions. When you wait you lose momentum and let doubt creep in. Seize any moment of genuine curiosity that you have and act on it.
I really can’t stress this enough — you must get out of your own way. Don’t overanalyze, don’t worry about not doing it right, you won’t do it right, that’s the point.
Once you choose a path, stop questioning. Commit and let go. Let the process run its course. It’s during the process that your new self, with new meanings, emerge.
The more you check the temperature of your soul every five minutes, the more you stifle the natural flow of energy that you’re supposed to be giving to the path. You choke the process. People become so hyperaware of themselves — their performance, their progress, their incompetence — that they become paralyzed.
If you pursue the path with genuine interest and curiosity, and with your whole self, not because you want to get rich or some other inauthentic motive, then there is no such thing as failure. You either succeed or you learn.
You’re after what a path will do to you, not whatever achievements you might get from it. Even though achievement will almost certainly follow, that’s just the nature of any sustained loving effort.
By staying, you come to develop what psychologists call ‘love knowledge’. It’s the kind of knowing that happens when you love what you know. A lover gains access to hidden meanings that a non-lover has no access to.
A botanist who loves plants will do much better work than a botanist who studies plants for career advancement. The loving-botanist will notice things that even the most intelligent prestige-botanist overlooks. Lovers will find subtle patterns and connections that are invisible to non-lovers. Love mysteriously enhances your perception.
Love also gives us a miraculous motivation. I hate email, but if it’s from students or others in the learning community, I become energized. I hate networking, but if it’s with writers, contemplatives, creatives or teachers, I can’t wait to connect. When you love what you do, everything becomes charged with meaning. Loving a zone of interest transforms the most menial task into an act of devotion.
When life comes alive
Life comes alive comes when absorption and meaning meet.
Plenty of people get absorbed in things that don’t carry much meaning for them. A person may spend hours in a video game, but later ask: “What does this add to my life?” An academic might spend years working on a piece of research, only to come to believe it is trivial, insignificant, or not worth the time.
The reverse is equally true. Many people do meaningful work that doesn’t really engage them. The medical student or social worker who finds their work meaningful but uninteresting and unengaging will not last in the profession.
But when the two converge — when what you love to do also matters deeply — you have one of the greatest gifts of life.
A gardener who delights in tending her plants may begin by doing it for pleasure, but over time that devotion grows into a felt purpose — by sustaining beauty, feeding her family, teaching others.
A calling marries two experiences:
The experience of flow — being deeply immersed, challenged and engaged.
The experience of meaning — you are serving something other than yourself, it expresses something essential about who you are, it makes you proud.
What will your legacy be?
For those who are serious about such a transformation, I lead a seminar that takes you through an intense process of self-realization and self-mastery. You will:
Discover your purpose
Master yourself
Design your dream career
If you’d like to join, you may go here.
"If you pursue the path with genuine interest and curiosity, and with your whole self, not because you want to get rich or some other inauthentic motive, then there is no such thing as failure. You either succeed or you learn."
I suppose. Though some of us pursued "the path" with our whole selves only to land in a position in which they weren't sure if they could afford, you know, basic medical care. And were actually OK with that and continued pursuing "the path," up until the point they had a child and couldn't justify putting that child at the same risk they'd accepted for themselves.
It's somewhat hard to square the above quote with the viral essay that led me to your work. There is such a thing as failure in the pursuit: It is having to submit to wage work. Because not every passion that one pursues with interest and curiosity and the whole self is one that can provide even the most basic level of personal safety/sustenance, at least not in an environment in which everything is engineered around said wage work.
Don't get me wrong: I like hearing the stories of the people who pursued what they love and made it work, one way or another. It's just that those stories are over-represented because of survival bias. The truth, I think, is that a lot of people are like me: They know what they love, they pursued it wholeheartedly as long as they could without it killing them and/or others, it didn't work, and they were left to figure out how to piece together a life in the aftermath of that failure with what was at hand. And there we are working for wages.
Thanks, Omar. This is my introduction to your writing. I'll need to reread it to completely soak it in.