#444 – How can you tell you’re not shrinking from your potential?

Fulfilling your potential isn't about money, cars, designer handbags or luxury condos. It's about aliveness.

Are you alive or sleep-walking through your life?

In Bullshit jobs: A Theory, anthropologist David Graeber shares a striking statistic: 40% of working adults think their jobs have no meaning and, if erased, no one would notice the difference.

Holding such jobs, he says, causes deep psychological and moral damage.

People with BS jobs know they're not living up to their potential, even when money flows abundantly, because they're not solving any real problems or helping anyone. They're wasting their creativity and they know it.

I've seen that in clients: when a software engineer became a Manager, an applied physicist became a Lab Director, a writer became a VP of Communication.

Also in myself, when I took a job as the executive assistant for the Head of Sales at a TV network. When I complained about pushing paper all day in a Midtown Manhattan office, my friend ET pushed back: "what? You get paid to read a book all day? I'd love that job!"

No, you wouldn't, I thought. No one does, because it's meaningless.

I remember looking at the Hudson River out of the window near my cubicle and thinking, "why am I not happier to be here?"

That's how under-being feels: you can't be happy even when your life looks great on paper. You can afford organic beefsteak tomatoes and the hair salon every week; you take extravagant vacations and your children go to top-notch schools; you have a personal trainer at a fancy gym.

Yet there's a hole in your soul, a hole that money can't fill. Because you know you could be more. More of your True Self.

What becomes possible when you quit compulsively under-being and follow your True Self?

Love,

Carolina