Focusing on what you really want

The answer to the following question is quite critical in understanding if you are leading a fulfilling life: "Are you doing things in life which you really wanted to do ? " I find that many people (including myself) get caught between two kinds of pressures :

p1: External pressures forcing them to take alternate paths
p2: Internal pressures forcing them to take the path that gives fulfillment

Most of the times, the external pressures succeed in forming the path for the individual. However,
in some of the cases, people who yielded to internal pressures made it big in life. I am writing this blog to help me and others (reading this blog) to figure out a solution. What can we do to carve a path that is guided by internal pressures ?

Well, I have been thinking about this question for a while now, especially after I landed up in my first job. I am going to focus more on the professional life in this blog because I feel that most of us spend about 30% of the time available to us in a week on work. So, let us refine the question a bit. Is your profession your passion ? If not, we need to analyze certain things here.

First, we need to understand what our passion is. The definition is subjective and may vary from one individual to another. My definition is : "when you engage yourself in an activity that draws your full attention and you enjoy every second of the time spent on the activity". I do not think anyone of us would disagree that cricket is Sachin's passion or dance is Michael Jackson's passion. When you follow your passions, you put your heart into it and forget everything else around you. You keep practicing it and at one point, you would suddenly realize that you have become extremely skilled in the activity. Other accolades would follow naturally. There is a common misconception among people that one activity is superior to another. If people around you ask you to take up another activity which might not be your passion (but you may like/dislike it), be prepared to convince them that it is not what you want. If someone takes you to a river and asks you to drown yourself, would you do it ? or would you convince them that it is a stupid act and move away from it ? Based on my experience, there are some factors that force people not to follow passions :

- financial stability
- competition and comparison
- Societal pressures
- Prestige in society

People who may be reading this blog may have more factors which they might have experienced.
Feel free to comment on those. These external pressures need to be handled by you by practicing a mind transformation. Think about it this way. The whole system around you was build upon constraints and everyone is striving hard to maximize gains within these constraints.
Break free from these constraints and dare to think differently. If you wanted to live in the wild and follow your passion, do it. Do not wait for approval from the society because you are never going to get it.

We need to first liberate the mind from the prison it is currently in. The prison is the design around you. If you cared to find the deeper meaning of "The Matrix", you can understand that the current system was imposed on you. They never took your approval to be a part of this system. You were born and then you were taken into this system. The system created a survival scheme for you. You were constantly thinking about surviving in this system and leading a comfortable life. Although you cannot do much about changing the system, what you can still do, is atleast follow your passions by listening to your inner self.


How do you liberate your mind ?