Existentialism: An Alternative Approach to Career Advancement
The majority of college students change their degrees multiple times before they graduate. Yet we’re putting an enormous pressure on our youth to have their life figured out by 18, 22, or even 30. No one has life figured out, so why are we holding onto this mindset as if it’s the answer to a fulfilling life.
I embodied this mindset and it caused me to stop every online business I’d ever begun. I failed because I embodied the mindset of “assuming whatever i’m working on right now is the path i’m going down for the rest of my life so it better be the right path.” This mindset causes so much inner suffering and struggle that it made it too hard to continue at whatever business venture I started at that moment, even if it was rewarding at the time.
No one is going to have their life figured out at 18, let alone any time in their life, so let’s change our approach to learning in a radical way.
Existentialism: The Antidote to Having NO Life Purpose
There is this philosophy known as Existentialism which can be applied to how we approach our careers. The basis of existentialism is that “Life has no fundamental meaning or truth beyond what is created by our decisions and actions within it.”
Q: How does this relate to one’s career?
A: We find meaning through doing, not through continuously thinking about what we want to do with our life. By developing new skills on a regular basis we create passion that we never knew existed just by trying new things out.
The antidote to limiting your life to a single career is, right now, figuring out the skill that you enjoy the most and are at least fairly decent at, and then moving towards that with all your energy, knowing that it’s not the end all be all. That you’re not going to be using only this one skill to make an income for the rest of your life but rather right now it’s the best course of option for you.
