The other day at work, I had some down time, and so I started having a conversation with one of my coworkers who was also just sitting around. I enjoy my chats with this guy because when we talk it’s more than just the mindless chatter that I have with some of the other people that I work with. We have meaningful discussions about life and the futures that we envision for ourselves. I began by telling him about this article that I had recently read where a thriving businessman talked about how he attributes his success to being lazy. The headline of the story grabbed my attention, because I automatically assumed that there was no way for you to have massive amounts of success in life while being lazy. As I went through the article, he started speaking about how he only participates in activities that can further his passions. In our society many people will get involved with various endeavors just because they don’t want to remain idle. He said that the problem with this is that when you fill your life with activity after activity just so that you can stay busy, you end up missing out on opportunities that you would actually enjoy doing. For example, let’s say that your passion in life is writing. You love it, but you can’t find writing gigs to do, so you just jump into a sales position so that you can have something to do. But now that you are in this sales position, you don’t have any more time to open yourself up to writing gigs that may come along and you may completely miss seeing writing opportunities because you’re so focused on the sales job. Now, I don’t think that he was saying that you should just walk around and be unemployed until a way for you to pursue your passion falls on to your lap, but what he was trying to say is that your life shouldn’t be so consumed with filler activities, that you don’t have time to pursue the things that you actually like and that you actually want to do.

My coworker was instantly intrigued by this article, but after I told him about it, he took it a step further by saying that some people only put all of their focus into one thing, and that this isn’t a good idea to do. If you only focus on one thing, and that one thing fails then you’ll be heart broken, but if you have multiple passions that you’re pursuing then you won’t be upset if that one thing fails because you’ll have other things that you can focus on. Some people only have one passion, but I’d be willing to bet that most of us out there don’t just have one. Heck, even the people with just one passion probably have different facets of it that they could delve deeper into. This means that we all have a variety of things that we could do that would make us happy, but we live in a society that tells us that we have to have one passion and follow that. There’s something “wrong” with you if you want to do too many things. It’s not realistic; therefore, you shouldn’t do it.

The thing is positive thinker, society shouldn’t dictate your happiness. If you want to do multiple things with your life then find a way to make that happen. A lot of times we find ourselves settling. We hit a certain age or we hit a certain point in our journey when we decide that that dream that we have is never going to happen. We think that we can’t achieve it, so we resign to having a life that we’re not so happy about. But we should never allow ourselves to reach that point. If you really want something bad enough then you have to go for it. If you know that that thing is going to make you happy then you need to find a way to make it happen for yourself. Happiness shouldn’t be a luxury; it’s what we should have just for being alive.

So don’t settle positive thinker. You are worthy of having a life that you’re happy about. It doesn’t matter if other people tell you that you can’t have it. Find some way to go out and get it. You deserve it!