Wise advice from Dan Millman: “Just fit in until you find out where you stand out”

Image by Hamed Saber

One of my con­stant sources of inspi­ra­tion is best-selling author Dan Mill­man. I am start­ing to notice a pat­tern here: two of my spir­i­tual guides (Jack Lalanne and Dan Mill­man) were for­mer ath­letes, and shared their per­spec­tives on life with oth­ers in a rather pub­lic way. If you know of more char­ac­ters like these two, please drop me a com­ment at the end of this post.

Let’s get back to Dan’s words. You can find the orig­i­nal piece, which was enti­tled ‘Dream Small’ on Dan’s per­sonal blog (click here for full arti­cle). On it Dan talks about the unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions that Gen Y’ers typ­i­cally have; and the impact this has on these young peo­ple when they get to com­pete for jobs in ‘the real world’. Dan’s advice? To dream small, take it a bit eas­ier while you find your­self, and allow suf­fi­cient time for you to gain expe­ri­ence and develop your­self, your skills, and your own dreams.

This arti­cle made me reflect on 2 issues that I have been think­ing about for quite some time. Firstly, it reminded me that we no longer recog­nise inex­pe­ri­ence for what it is: a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to try dif­fer­ent things and find your­self. In today’s ultra-competitive, uber-complex world, we expect our chil­dren to choose-their-path as soon as they fin­ish high school — ide­ally even before– and charge ahead with deter­mi­na­tion and per­se­ver­ance. News­pa­pers and books around us are filled with ‘inspi­ra­tional’ sto­ries of those who found their call­ing at 14 or 15, started their career with impe­tus and energy, and became famous and/or a mil­lion­aires by the age of 25.

The prob­lem with this abun­dance of sto­ries on suc­cess­ful peo­ple is that it rein­forces the illu­sion that we should all do the same. Not just that peo­ple can, and if you’re lucky enough, you will have the expe­ri­ence and skills and moti­va­tion to do it; but that it is only a mat­ter of wishing-for-it strongly enough, and it will hap­pen. Add to this the lat­est craze around ‘The Secret’ and ‘The Law of attrac­tion’, and you end up with a gen­er­a­tion that believes that the only thing you need to do to suc­ceed is sit around dream­ing and affirm­ing your desires, and life will put them in your plate effortlessly.

Unfor­tu­nately, the world just does not work like that. Affir­ma­tions and desire are impor­tant, but it takes ACTION inspired by those dreams to make things hap­pen. Today, many peo­ple have for­got­ten this sec­ond — and crit­i­cal — part of the equa­tion! My advise then is not to stop dream­ing — but don’t just stop at dream­ing, or you will be seri­ously disappointed.

The sec­ond topic that Dan’s arti­cle reminded me about is the con­cept of ‘defin­ing & tak­ing con­trol of your career’. In today’s cor­po­rate world, there is an inbuilt expec­ta­tion that every­one WANTS a career. But I know many peo­ple that just want a job that pro­vides suf­fi­cient for their needs, with­out drain­ing them of the time & energy they need for their life pas­sion. And these peo­ple typ­i­cally do not give a hoot about where their career is going. In a way, they are enjoy­ing their lives while sup­port­ing them­selves with a job. Unfor­tu­nately, this con­cept does not sit well in the cor­po­rate world of today.

It is amaz­ing to think of just how uni­ver­sal has this con­cept become in today’s cor­po­rate world. Espe­cially when we know that not every­one needs and wants a career. Large con­sult­ing firms have devel­oped par­tic­u­larly dis­crim­i­na­tory prac­tices on this regard. Many of them have estab­lished poli­cies that stip­u­late that if you don’t move to the ‘next level’ within a set period of time, you must leave the firm (‘Up-Or-Out’). For cler­i­cal or admin­is­tra­tive staff, they adjust it and sug­gest that if you are not devel­op­ing new skills or mov­ing up the per­for­mance curve, you must leave (‘Grow-or-go’).

But where does this leave the sin­gle mother of two who needs a decently paid job to sup­port her chil­dren, yet has reached the Pin­na­cle of her learn­ing and effi­ciency curve? Or the young guy who decides to fol­low Dan’s advise and ‘just get a job’ so that he can pay the bills while he gets enough life expe­ri­ence that he can fig­ure out which direc­tion to take?

We live in a mad world. The cor­po­ra­toc­racy we live in adores mass, homo­ge­neous mar­kets, and abhors diver­sity. Unfor­tu­nately, the side effects of these prin­ci­ples of indus­tral­i­sa­tion are insid­i­ous and cor­ro­sive; Some­thing must be done. If you agree with these ideas, why not joins us in try­ing to do some­thing about it?

You could start by shar­ing some of these thoughts with co-workers; ques­tion the whole idea of career-obsession, and ask them how it has affected them, both pos­i­tively and neg­a­tively. You can then engage your HR depart­ment in a dia­logue about the diver­sity of needs their work­force has, and high­light the ben­e­fits that imple­ment­ing more pro­gres­sive poli­cies could have in their abil­ity to attract and retain a more pro­duc­tive and tal­ented work­force. Or if you want to be a bit more extreme, take am intel­lec­tual break from your career-oriented life, and stop to smell the roses. Live in the present; Dream small, like Dan sug­gests; and observe — really observe — what hap­pens in your life. Your out­look on life and love and those things that mat­ter most is likely to change; and then you can say that at least you have man­aged to change the world and reduce its num­ber of career-extremists by one.

Go crazy. Seize the day.

Tagged as: Essays, Life, Philosophy, Reflections, Religion, Reply to other blog post, Sustainability, Thoughts