Finding your own path

Finding your own path

Finding your own life path involves deep understanding of the subject and decision making at every moment of the life. Sometimes those decisions are small & insignificant, and sometimes those decisions are life changing. At the end of the day or year, or at the end of entire life it’s all defined by the quality of decision making and the actions that you take along the way.

There’s definitely immense power in decision making and creating your own life; even when one is not completely sure of the right path. The challenge is that many people have a “deer in the headlights” moment when faced with decisions and to certain extent, most people suffer from decision paralysis at some point in time.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth – Albert Einstein

One of the key reasons why you are not able to create your own path is acceptance of Authority. These authorities are influencing our life and decision making processes so deeply that we don’t even realize that. The authorities like media, social media, and advertisement world are so powerful that the prospect of creating your own path without their influence is almost impossible.

The acceptance of authority means being the blind follower and not using the intelligence. In order to see this closely, let’s analyze the authorities affecting the process of choosing the right career for any individual:

  • Parents: Depending upon any family’s ecosystem, parents can be direct and indirect authority to control the decisions. In some cases parents are literally commanding the direction of their kid’s career and in some cases there is emotional blackmailing angle. The rich & educated parents try & impose their ideas smartly and not so rich parents gets the same done by using emotional blackmailing citing the challenges they had faced in one’s upbringing.

 

  • Relatives: Most of the times, relatives are direct authority for parents and indirect authority for kids, especially if they are rich and influential. In certain situations, relatives can be direct authority because of their strong position in the family ecosystem.

 

  • Peer Pressure: Peer pressure is the most impactful authority and it does the magic before people even realize it. It’s no surprise that large number of people take their career decisions because of their friends joining a particular stream, college or organization.

 

  • Internet: Imagine searching the best college(s) for a particular location and you might end up getting the ones on top which are not the best colleges by any means. In the world of internet, you are supposed to get the answers based upon promoted links/ SEO backed search results. The algorithms are meant to benefit the search engine owners & advertisers and not the users. Making internet an authority can backfire until you dig deeper to get the meaningful results. Always remember, ‘if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product’.

 

  • Money: Money works as an authority for most of the people and there are very few who don’t give undue importance to money.

 

  • Superstitions: In some sections of the society, superstitions are so strong an authority to hold people back in their career & life.

The right approach in this case would be to use all the available tools, technologies and available alternatives intelligently; keeping all the beliefs aside.

Though the above illustration was limited to only choosing the right career, however there are many such authorities affecting every phase of our life. The inability to choose your own life path can wreak havoc on your confidence, your happiness, and your overall emotional well-being. Happiness is byproduct of freedom and when you accept the authority, you are stuck and achieving happiness is impossible without being free. The root cause of this problem is that you always seek solution from others and aren’t prepared to apply your own brain. In case you expect others to apply their brains for you, please be mindful of the fact that they’ll protect their interests first and will make sure what benefits them.    

After having read this article so far, some of you must be thinking loud in your heads that we now know that the authorities are there and they hijack our thought process and decision making but ‘what should we do to handle this? How do we manage our parents and other authorities? In my view, if these questions are posed to me or to anyone else, you are creating one more authority to find solutions for you. You need to ask these questions only to yourself and that’s where the real solution can be found. It’s not a matter of just career or education, it’s a lifelong process.

In the process, taking help from others is fine, you can speak with sorted & sensible people around you (in case you have that luxury). Picking their brains and seeing things from their perspective can be of great help. You can make use of technology to have the required inputs but the key lies in questioning and using your own intelligence. 

Religion has been the biggest authority for everyone across the globe and we have seen people killing each other because of that. People believing what’s written in a particular book is ‘right’ and automatically tag other books or thoughts as ‘wrong’ in their heads. This right and wrong is being created in people minds because of Authority and not because of questioning or proper understanding.

In curiosity & questioning there is no authority and with courage & intelligence you can question anything or everything.

“If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” – Frank A. Clark