Are you wasting time?
Last night at church my pastor preached about the importance of not wasting your time. He used a University Study that has got me to spending a bit of my time mulling over. The study was done by a University that studied the 1,500 participants over the course of 20 years. The 1,500 participants were put into two groups; Group A, the people who chose their career as a means of making more money, or Group B, the people who worked for their dream first and figured the money would come later. There were 1,255 people who chose Group A while only 245 chose Group B.
Out of the lot only 101 of them became millionaires. Out of Group A, the people who wanted to make a lot of money now only one became a millionaire. Out of Group B, those that worried about their dreams first, there were 100 who became millionaires.
I had been thinking already about what I wanted to do with my life, but this made the issue even more pressing. Not knowing what I should be doing with my life makes me feel as if I am wasting it. And in a sense I am. Sure, I may be doing General Education, growing closer to God, and working. But what if I don’t need General Education courses for my dream? What if I am supposed to be doing and working towards my dream right now? What if I have already missed a big opportunity with my dream because I didn’t consider it to be as pressing of a deal when I was in High School?
My Pastor also said that deep down you know what you are supposed to be. You have desires, wishes, and dreams but just may be too scared to act on them. My friend Evan knows his dream, he wants to produce music but he decided to start off at WIT and like me, do General Education. He is now seriously considering changing his major to what he wants to do, music producer, instead of just wasting his time doing General Education, like I may be.
Pastor put the urgency of not wasting time into perspective for me. Before I was concerned and feeling like a loser and could finally understand what my friend Danny had talked to me about in the middle of my Senior Year which was just this past year. He had chosen the path of working after High School and he told me how he felt like a loser not going to college like the other kids were doing, mainly because he didn’t know what he felt his calling in life was. At that time, I only felt bad for him, because I figured I didn’t know what I wanted to be therefore I knew how he felt but I was wrong. From the time of being in High School and wanting to know what I want to be and being in college wanting to know, for me, were vastly different kinds of want.
In High School I wanted to know, sure, but I figured I had time to figure it all out before I was in college. But the time for college came all too quickly and I still did not know. At the time of my initially choosing to go to WIT for General Education I was restless, trying to figure out if it was right. And then after a little bit of scrounging around in my brain, searching the internet, and prayer for my dreams and what would work for me as a job, I just got this overwhelming peace about it, for the sole fact that I’d rather do WIT and General Education then waste my time even more by only working. That peace only increased at my graduation where we had to give the speaker a couple sentences about us and our goals to which I wrote, I was going to WIT and did not know what my goal was at the time. The speaker commented saying in a more graceful sentence, that it was okay not to know, many people don’t know.
At the time knowing I wasn’t the only one gave me peace but I don’t want to be amongst the majority wasting my life living for money, or possibly unnecessary education. I want to do the desires of my heart for aren’t you better off working towards knowing your goal than just sitting idly?
Now I have to figure out, What am I good at? What do I like doing? As I was talking to Evan this morning he asked me those same questions. Oddly enough he brought up suggestions like writing and reading, which are two things I like to do. He also brought up art, which I haven’t done in a very long time but I remember loving. Those things are in my list of things I like to do as are; interior design, architecture, and just being a mom.
Well first off, only being a mom is out of the picture for the sole fact that I am not even close to being married yet so having children now is out of the picture too and waiting around for that to happen would be wasteful. With interior design or architecture, I don’t want to move away from Sioux City and for those jobs you kinda have to be in a bigger city, especially since what I would want to do with that job is design and construct the house and then decorate the inside, which isn’t usual since people usually get people who specialize in an area, not people who do it all mediocre. Granted I would want to learn all I can in each area.
The more I think about this oppressing question, the more I remember that one time back in tenth grade I was in with my Spanish teacher for a heart-to-heart girls time. We watched a video where this lady, Lisa, told us her life story. In it she explained how she was shy and quiet and was also blind in one eye from cancer. During her high school years it was required that you take speech and keyboarding but with the empathy of her counselor she didn’t have to (because of her eye). She said she figured God was laughing at her during that time since that is what she is doing today. She speaks to girls all over the country about the importance of getting to know God and waiting for the man He has set out for us, the importance of patience and prayer. She also writes books over what she speaks to the girls that she sees while touring, which require a keyboard to do.
I remember when I heard her say that the feeling of, “that’ll be you.” Which I personally think would be cool, but me speaking? In front of people, let alone taping it for even more to see? Or me writing girly books?
The thing that I have always had a desire to do would be to be a stay at home mom with the five kids I aspire to conceive, then have and be a writer. Writing not only books that help young girls to hopefully not make the same mistakes I have but also books that entertain them and tell them of an imaginational story that has some sort of Biblical backing. That, to me, would be the perfect career goal. But is it what I’m supposed to be is the question I now have to answer.
