“I don’t do this for the money or the recognition. I do this because I was born to do it. Because I’m passionate about it. Because I feel it in my bones”.
There’s no way to prove whether or not people are born to do something. The only thing you can do is whether to believe it or not. You either believe that you are free to make choices or that your life was previously determined.
In my experience, most people that say something like the above quote, are musicians, writers, bloggers, puppeteers, and other creative types. I can’t prove whether they believe it, but it seems that some use it as crutch. Something that they’re trying to convince themselves to believe. I’m sure that artists that have been successful (recognition as well as financially) don’t need those kind of external motivations to keep doing what they do. But the successful ones don’t say it as much as the unsuccessful ones.
I have yet to find someone that says that they were born to be an accountant. I’ve never heard a real estate agent saying that he will keep selling houses even if he doesn’t get paid. “Oh, but those are just jobs”, you might say. That’s one of the problems right there with the idea that “creative jobs” are callings from God and the “non-creative” ones are a choice to pay the rent.
If you have to justify what you do with trascendental feelings of passion and destiny, your raising the bar to impossible heights. Without getting into a philosophical debate, I’m sure most people are rational and believe in free will. So if you try to convince yourself everyday that you don’t have a choice, then you don’t have a choice, and that’s not a good thing.
When you truly like doing something, you just do it. I’m sorry. It’s really that simple. It’s like breathing and bowel movements. You don’t need to think about it or justify it. But unlike bowel movements if you choose to be a writer that’s one choice out of the many choices you could have made. Sure, you have to commit to it in order to get good at it, but being committed is one thing and feeling that it’s something that you were born to do is another.
If you’re not being successful at something, no matter how much you believe that it’s something that you’ll keep on doing no matter what, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re not successful at it. You just have to work. Like an accountant or a real state agent.
