I’m suffering from an overdose of “Elle Luna-ish” lately.
Starting from the excellent post at Medium on The Crossroad of Should and Must, it depicts what most of us face today. We all have a choice in choosing what we want, but most often as we ponder upon our dreams, we let them fade away in the face of reality.
Chasing dreams are often glamarous – go for it, they say. Don’t grow old and let regrets cloud over your life. What you do is what defines you. There are many such proverbs that motivates us, get our inner fire boiling and tugs at us to just start doing what we must be doing.
But as we all know, it’s not often as simple as quitting our job and the dreams we envision in our mind will just fall in place. Like Shawn Blanc said, it takes focus, diligence and hard work for our dreams to come true. Having a clear goal distill the process into actionable steps. And we move towards this goal and celebrate the small victories.
I’m at a crossroad now. I always have been. I would love to be a baker, making loafs and loafs of breads and cakes off the oven, serving them pipping hot to the hands (and mouth) of customers. Nothing beats the smell of freshly baked pastries, not even coffee. And also, I’d love to take a backseat, be at a place surrounded by plenty of greeneries. A gardener and farmer sounds good. Tending to plants, plucking ingredients that I grow in the yard to cook sounds fantastic.
On a more realistic outlook, I’m a marketing and business practitioner and nothing makes me more happy than studying brands. Why influence people to choose a particular brand over others. It’s part pyschology, part science, part creative. It’s the study of human mind. Brands have a big say in how we behave and they shape our perspective. I’d love to be involve in brand development, and work with small startups and big companies in taking their brand to the next level.
Alas, I’ve never been able to get into such post or given an opportunity within the company to fulfill this promise. In life, not everything goes your way. But as Dusty Summers said, “The mistakes, errors, dead-ends, and wrong turns you make are going to be more important than the projects that just turned out okay.”
I’m hoping this long detour will make me better appreciate the smell of roses when I do find them in the future.