"What are you going to do today?"
A great question to start this post, but also end the video below.
This'll make sense after you watch the video
Okay, so I'm not going to lie – at the heart of Project:IDWIL is a certain desire to motivate people. But that's not the primary objective and doesn't necessarily come across in the obvious actions of how Project:IDWIL works. The things that you'll hear about over and over again from this community are things like career choices, finding your passion, rediscovering your passions, examining your values, introspection, leveraging your interests, etc. However, I would not be where I am today if I hadn't had some influences in the realm of motivation, coaching, and mentoring. And this can be a tricky thing because as 1) a guy, and 2) a guy who thinks he has a pretty good handle on how things work, it is easy to view emotion and feelings based work as "soft" or even "less important" than hard logical/provable-unprovable perspectives. It's never been at the forefront of Project:IDWIL to be a direct source of motivation – a lot of what this is all about is serving up authentic stories of people who have been successful in aligning their passions and values with what they actually get to do when they go to work. From there it's up to the individual watching the videos to decide if that inspires them or not. It's also noteworthy that watching a particular video one time and not being inspired doesn't mean that the same video could create an inspirational feeling at a different time. Nonetheless, the onus is on the viewer. This comes from the fact that I love helping people find stuff (whether that be content, media, other people) that is valuable to them as an individual. The trick with that is that everybody has their own idea of what's "valuable." This is the reason that, though interesting to me, the notion of providing motivation and inspiration directly is not quite in my wheelhouse.
I understand that I need to step away from this mentality because a friend shared a video with me that was quite poignant. Watch the 3 1/2 minute video below, and I dare you not to think a little bit differently about your life . It is one of those scary/interesting/"make you think" kind of videos. So, thanks go out to Dave Leisure for not only sharing the video, but specifically sharing it with me and Project:IDWIL in mind. I am grateful to have friends not only support my vision, but to understand it well enough to be able to begin participating.