Great advice from Dave Pollard

This great poem by Dave Pollard is too good to miss. Make sure you visit Dave’s how to save the world blog for lots more thoughtful posts about the world we live in and how we choose to live within it.

my advice to you

my advice to you
is simple: find out what you are meant to do
and do it, and
find out who you really are,
under all the junk that has been attached to you
by those who would make you
everybody else,
and be that.

what you are meant to do is at the sweet spot
where what you are good at
(better than anyone else you know),
and what you love doing,
and what is needed in the world
that you care about,
all intersect.

the hard part is not the finding of the intersection
but in knowing yourself: knowing what you are good at,
and knowing what you love to do
(when you have done so little!)
and knowing what you really care about

(for there is so much needed in the world —
that part is easy to find).

do not worry about objectives, or outcomes of your work:
simply practice —
there is no mastery, there is only the trying,
and learning, and getting better.

the stuff you are meant to do
does not have to have a name;
it is not a job description.
it is just what you are meant to do.
don’t worry about how this stuff fits together
or doesn’t — just practice.

the people who need what you are meant to do
do not care what it is called.

if you’re not sure what you do uniquely well
or what you’d love to do
or what you really care about
just try some things:
you learn what you are meant to do, sometimes
by discovering what you were not meant to do.

what you are meant to do
and who you really are
are not the same thing:
what you’re meant to do is learned, discovered,
but who you really are has always been there —
it is a matter of unlearning
who you have been told to be,
or told you are,
or should be,
until all that is left is the knowledge
of who you are and always were:
nobody but yourself.