The direction is more important than the speed. How fast the speed you are, and it means nothing if you lost your direction. Yet, it just makes you fail again.
I think you have ever been like this every day, and you feel that there are countless goals in your life. For work, you’re obtaining the KPIs to complete. Besides, you also need to invest or spend time in financial management, maintain connections, take care of your family, learn knowledge, and manage your health, and so forth. You think that you’re very busy with various goals daily. Thus, you should be considered a person with a strong sense of purpose or direction, right?
If you think like that, you treat your goals as tasks to be completed, indicators to be achieved. And it may not your direction as well, since the real direction is the goal that involves the real problem which connects you to the world.
Once you are truly concerned about a certain problem in the world and want to do something to change the status quo, you have a real goal or the direction to reach out. Such a goal can help you calibrate every step of the moment, and it can also give your life a lasting sense of meaning so that you will not fall into nothingness and will not doubt the value of your own existence. To live a happy life, each of us needs such a goal, and it means your direction.
On the way to finding the direction, you may be unable to prepare to grasp the path you will be on the right track. In fact, what I have experienced from my twenties, there are many trials I have tried and it’s been lost the direction as well. It’s not just from the experiences, but also from some books and articles I have read previous, especially I have found a book, the path to purpose by William Dimon, that is very fascinating and matches this topic I will share.
Probably, people will start from the rudderless to know nothing about their direction, and most of the young generations are in need of guidance to help them move forward. For instance, some are “dabblers” who pursue strings of disconnected interests with no real commitment, and others are “dreamers” or “visionary” who have no realistic plans or understanding of what success will require. In brief, there are many people who easily fall into this trap of misunderstanding in the process of finding the direction. Or, also see further discussion in the previous article, Understand the Path of Direction, for detail as well.
There are four types of people, live with no direction, the dreamers who obtain their goal but do not match enough to their reality, the dabblers who define a specific path for themselves and have no value enough for them to pursue to succeed at the last, and finally, only the one with the clear purpose of direction and reflecting the three characteristics of themselves and the world: their own abilities; the world’s need for the services they can provide; they are in the process of serving society in their own way to pleasure their experience in.
For the first type of people who live without direction, they cannot even understand or how important the goal or direction is important to their life. Sometimes, people might say that that’s fine, it’s positive thinking toward life, without any concern and just be happier as they are. Yes, I am not in conjunction with that, but the reality of life it’s not the kind of positive as we thought. And it’s just a short period of pleasing or relaxation you can treat as the small part of life only. Thus, I think it will reflect you when you see people live without the goal, and you will image your direction of life as the most important to you.
Gradually, when we look at the second and third types, even we can see the purpose or direction is getting clearer, yet there is some missing insider we cannot understand or figure out it immediately or well distinct the points out. Because there is no link the direction or goal to the real problem that can connect them to the world.
Unless the fourth type, who obtaining two enlightening moments are the key points for a person to find a clear, long-term goal, or direction. And, the first revelatory key point is discovered that there are some important things in the world that can be corrected or improved. Then the second revelatory key point is realized that he could make some contributions to this and change the situation.
After that, you will find that the direction is more important than speed. For example, when the freshly graduated students get started their first job which does not really match their background and also does not really meet their interests. Anyway, for the necessity basically, a job is important for living so they do the work. If they have their own clear direction with the two key points above, the job is just the temporary one that they need to effort for living. They may stay in the job for a short period of time, then they will quit and jump to another quest of their career path. Gradually, they will go ahead without any concern about leaving the current job even the wage may be higher than the new one that fits the career they get.
In contrast, for the previous 3 types of people they are not. When the time after time is gone, they might make themselves late on adapting to change for growth. Because they are involved in the uncertain direction or the blank goal which is not returned or produce the value to their own self. In addition, some of them may drive into the comfort zone, and after 3 to 5 years later they will feel no energy to challenge the external environment, due to the uncertainty of goal and their will or they have no more passion to improve themselves to catch up the growth of the market or circumstances. After 10 years or more, though how fast they have grown in that specific area, they still will fail rashly when the crisis or other impact happened suddenly. The loss of job, income, and especially the value of the life, and everything did not really mean at all at that moment.
Thus, it’s better to be ready from the beginning to understand the path to direction is important to you to define your life and plan your career for growth. Of course, if you are still uncertain about the direction of your life, you can explore and help yourself anchor your goals. In short, to discover what are the important things in your life and it will be better when that can be corrected or improved, then realize what you could make the contributions to this and change the situation. That’s you will full of the sense of direction toward your life and even to influence to the others.