How do you know what you wanna do with life? I love answering this question because it's one that I spent so many years figuring out in my early twenties. The short answer is you don't.
You figure it out as you go. You follow the clues, you follow your curiosity, and slowly the answer will reveal itself in time. But if you are, Let's say in your early twenties and you don't know what you wanna do with life, you feel pressured that you have to choose what career to go into.
All your parents and peers are asking you, What are you gonna do with your life? What are you gonna do with your life? I hated that question with a passion.
It gave me so much anxiety. I feel like even when you're in college and the few years outside of college, That's all people ask you about. It's really hard to face the world if you don't have a solid answer to that question.
It's hard to be uncertain. It can make you feel like you don't know yourself. You're unsure of yourself.
It just doesn't feel good to show up in the world, not knowing. We all wanna feel confident and knowing, and we all wanna feel in control, right? So that's why this was one of the hardest struggles to go through.
If you're going through it right now, you're not alone. I feel you. There are so many people who are in the same boat.
But to begin to answer your question, How do I know what I want to do in life? There are a few things that I wanna share. The first thing is your heart knows the way.
Your heart doesn't know the answer, but it knows the way, and when I say that, I mean your intuition is your compass and it will guide you to where you're meant to go. The biggest takeaway if you are trying to create your dream life is you have to be able to follow your heart. you have to be able to trust your intuition and listen to your inner voice.
I feel like that's the number one most important thing. If you want to know what you're doing in life, If you wanna create a life that you love, You have to listen to yourself. Because if you are operating from a place of, oh, I should be doing this, I think it makes more sense, It's logical to do that, or I'll be more successful if I do this.
You're operating off of something external, whether it's the opinions of others or society. You have to operate internally. You have to let your internal compass guide you because only that deep knowing knows where to go.
It knows what feels right and what doesn't feel right. For example, when I was in college, I did a bunch of internships. I was studying business.
I thought I would go into marketing. I interned for entertainment companies and ad agencies, but in all of the internships that I did, I did seven. I never felt like I could enjoy that life.
I just knew corporate was not for me. I didn't like the structure. I didn't even want the boss's job or the boss's boss's job.
I just knew if I headed down this path, It just felt so restricting like this is the highest you can go in this career path. And I wanted a life where I had more freedom, but I wanted to be able to be creative. I wanted to be able to travel whenever I want.
I wanted to have financial freedom. I wanted to have time and freedom. I wanted to wake up and sleep whenever I want.
The structure was not for me. So internally something was telling me that's not the way to go. I tried to force it for a few years, even forcing going through school and waking up.
My body literally could not do it. My body would just like want to sleep in no matter how much I'm like, No, I have to get to class in the morning. You feel something deep down when you're not on the right path, And I have a feeling if you're watching this, You might be able to relate to that feeling.
Use your intuition and your inner voice as a compass to guide you. As I said, it's not gonna know the answer, but it will know whether the current present reality feels right or doesn't feel right. If you're avoiding waking up, if you're avoiding life, if you're avoiding showing up to anything, that's a sign, that's a sign that you're not meant to be there.
So take everything as a sign guiding you in the right direction. Failures are guiding you in the right direction. It's okay to fail.
It's okay to do something, Make mistakes I got fired from a couple of internships. Those were failures that taught me lessons and led me in the right direction. Or even when I was pursuing music or pursuing acting, There was pivotal moments that kind of like guided me like, Okay, nope, this is not for you.
This is not for you. Another thing that I wanna talk about is every career path has something. Elizabeth Gilbert calls the "shit" sandwich, Which means that every path has something That's not pleasant to deal with.
There's something that's difficult regardless of what you do. You know that that path is right for you When you are willing to deal with that sandwich Where you think it's worth it because the pros outweigh the cons. For me, when I was pursuing music for example, I loved music, and I loved expressing myself and performing, but as I started performing every single month, going to different venues, lugging my keyboard, and my equipment everywhere, I hated that logistics traveling part.
I hated like setting up as an independent musician, You're doing everything yourself. I realized that down the line, Do I still wanna be doing this when I'm in my forties, my fifties and I was like, no, I don't see myself doing that. I didn't like the idea of being older and still having to tour Cause it just seemed too exhausting.
I love music but I don't like this idea of going from place to place and not having a home base, Not being able to, you know, be in the comfort of my home. and then with acting and the entertainment industry, there's like crazy hours. First of all, there's like long times on set and super early call times.
It was not for me. I was not willing to deal with that and the pros did not outweigh the cons. Even with my current path, content creator, entrepreneur, there are so many sandwiches that go along with it, but I personally feel like they're worth it, right?
I believe the pros outweigh the cons. I'm willing to deal with the negative aspects of these careers because I believe the good outweighs everything that's bad. You can get a feel for the sandwich of every career by number one talking to people who are already working that path.
Like ask them honestly, What do you hate? What's the hardest part of your job? What's the most difficult part?
I learned the slow way. I have to like try things, experience it and then realize it's not for me. So it took me a while to like try things out and feel how it felt like to be in that role.
There's never a perfect career. Everything that's worth doing is hard, but if you love it enough, if you believe the pros outweigh the cons, then you're willing to stick it through and you're willing to persevere regardless of how difficult it gets. Another clue to knowing what you should do with your life is to ask yourself, Where do I light up?
Find that spark, everybody has a light within everybody. Like comes alive doing certain things like do you come alive when you're helping people? Does it make you feel really good inside?
Do you come alive as you're creating? Do you come alive when you're solving problems? Do you come alive when you're solving math equations?
Everybody has skills, gifts, and talents, things that you do that you're both good at and it feels good when you do it. Time stops and you're in flow like it feels easy. Not necessarily because it's easy, but because you have so much energy for it.
Ask yourself, what makes me come alive? Where do I light up? What do I have the most energy for?
Some people have a lot of energy talking to people, right? They can talk to people all-day and they can come home and feel energized, like, I can't do that. I can't.
Some people can and that means they need to live in a way That allows them to light up in that way, Whereas other people are the complete opposite and they come alive when they're researching really deeply. Everybody's different, but there is something in you that comes alive when you're doing something. So what you're meant to be doing is related to that.
Another thing I wanna touch on is you want to figure out what your values are, Which means what do you care about? What's important to you in your life and then what is your ideal lifestyle? What is your ideal life?
I don't need to get super into this because we have so many videos on this. One is the video I made about how to find your why, Which helps you figure out your values As well as how to figure out your dream life, Which helps you detail what your ideal dream life looks like. It's so important to know those things or at least start to ask yourself those questions Because once you have a grand vision of what you want out of your life, Then you can kind of work backward and be like, Okay, does this step take me closer or further away from that vision?
The reason why I bring this up is In my early twenties, I see a lot of people, At least my peers at that time, Make decisions based on what is best at that time, right? Oh, this job is high paying or This job is prestigious so I'm gonna take this job. And then I see people end up in careers for way too long that they don't enjoy And then in the end that career Doesn't even give them the lifestyle that they want.
They realized their dream life was, Oh, I wanna be able to travel more, but this career is not allowing them to. This was the reason that I absolutely did not take A corporate job when I graduated, Even though my parents wanted me to, Even though society was telling me to, Cause they're like, it's the most logical thing to do, just get a job, you got a good degree, blah, blah, blah. But I was like, no, if I take that job, I know I'm gonna be stuck in this framework and this box of living and it's gonna be hard to exit and transition out of that.
At least for me, it was better to just start fresh as a creative. I'm like, I'm gonna be an artist and I'm gonna figure it out and live a creative, flexible life. I figured it out in my own way.
That's not to say that you can't switch careers later in life. I see a lot of people do that. If you already know what you want, go for it.
Don't do, don't take a detour and be like, Okay, I'm gonna do this for a little bit, and then I'm gonna go for what I want because you're just wasting time, And when you do that career change and that transition, You're starting at the beginning, You're starting from scratch, So would you rather start at the beginning? Now when you're young, I mean you're still, you might still be young later on, But your time is what matters and time is something that you can't buy back. Time is the most valuable asset in life and that's kind of what was on my mind.
Take the risks, start from zero while I'm young because I don't wanna like say, get a job and get a spoiled living, You know, at a certain standard of living because I'm making income and then quitting that to start from zero again. Again, each person has a different story and different backgrounds, So they might have different reasons for doing it differently, But I'm just sharing how I did it and What was on my mind because I could live a few years without making money. I had that financial support from my parents.
I did freelance jobs where I did live at home, I still live at home now. Technically, again, each person has their own circumstances and their own reasons for doing things the way they do them. On that note, I do wanna add, Do not be afraid to start over.
Do not be afraid to pivot. If you are going in a certain direction and it doesn't feel right, Don't be afraid to start over from scratch. It's totally okay.
I also had to start over multiple times in my journey because the first thing that I went for wasn't what I ended up doing. I started pursuing music and then I was doing freelance marketing and I tried acting a little bit, but in the end, I landed on YouTube. That was a big pivot in my career because I had to start over with a new channel.
Again, this goes back to continuing to listen to your inner voice, following your intuition. Imagine you're driving like down a foggy road. I don't know if you've ever done that, but it feels dangerous and it's scary because you can't see anything, but all you can see is like what's directly in front of you.
So you just follow the road that's directly in front of you. That's how I envision this journey of figuring out your life. Like you just know what's here and now and what's like the next step in front and then you just follow it.
Use your intuition to guide you. Does this feel right? Does this not feel right?
And just follow it. Don't be afraid if your intuition tells you, Oh, I went the wrong way. It can be really scary to be like, Ugh, I spent all these years going this way and now I have to start over and I have the U-turn and turn around.
That's scary and a lot of people don't do that because they're afraid of that choice. But on this path to figuring out your dream life, you can't be afraid to make those decisions. You can't be afraid of change.
The last thing I wanna leave you with is that Nothing is ever wasted. Even if you spend years doing something that you feel is not related or if you go one way and then turn around, None of it is wasted because Everything that you've ever done in life, Everything that you've ever experienced, Everything that you've ever learned is a part of you now and it can be used towards what you're meant to do in the future. I think that's the biggest lesson that I learned, You know because I spent a few years Trying a bunch of different things, Trying to figure it out and you could say that time was wasted.
Like if I knew I could just start YouTube earlier, but it's not like that. Everything that I did, all those opportunities, All that experience, It gave me the skills, it gave me the confidence, It gave me just everything that I needed To start the thing that I was meant to do and to do it well because you get to practice. So regardless of where you are in life, Don't feel bad, Be proud of yourself because you're here, You made it up to this point, which is amazing.
Everything that you experienced prior to, Now you can use, It's part of your toolset and in fact, It's all leading you to where you're meant to go. It just might not make sense right now, But it will make sense in the future. You know, when you look back, the dots will connect.
For example, in my journey, Spending those years pursuing music and entertainment and being lost, Like being really struggling, You know, I took those years to Try a lot of different things that I was interested in and I also dove into reading a lot of self-help books Cause I was really in the search of my purpose and how to figure it out. Through that, I realized how proud I was for not taking the conventional path Even though I wasn't making any money I still I gained so much life experience and I did so many things that I wouldn't have gotten to do If I took a corporate nine to five job. I released an EP, I threw an album release party that was like a creative project that I was really proud of.
I got an opportunity to fly to Taiwan, live there for a month, and shoot a short film with some of my film friends. It's experiences like that where I'm like, dude, I have no regrets over the choice that I took. I felt like so much more fulfilled doing all those things and it really informed the way I look at life.
It really informed the whole concept and foundation of Lavendaire Life as an art. Make it your masterpiece. Recognizing that life itself is an art and we get to be as creative as we want with it.
As an artist, you have your own expression, you have your own like style, and your gifts and you just use that to paint whatever you want with life. I just thought that concept was so beautiful like life is a canvas and it's not necessarily empty. Like you're born with some things That are already said in stone like You're born with your parents and your family and your environment, This and that, but there's still so much more you can create from there.
And as you live life, as you create your life, If you find that you don't like what your life looks like right now, If you don't like what you painted, It's fine, paint over it, or like turn it into something new. Turning this like rock into a butterfly. Right?
I'm just imagining that art transforming that concept inspired me so much that I wanted to explore it by starting a new user YouTube channel called Lavendaire, Where I talk about this pursuit of becoming an artist of life, Which is someone who continually creates the life that they love, The life of their dreams and thus here we are, It will be nine years since I launched this channel in 2014, Which is pretty much a decade and it's crazy. But I'm so proud of what this became Going back to like how I knew this was what was right for me. It finally felt so right.
It's through the comments that people left in my early videos. I felt like I was actually making a positive impact. I felt like this was a career where I could be creative and have the freedom that I wanted.
It just felt like everything that I wanted, Could happen through this career. Like the dots are finally connected. Like I had my vision of what I wanted in life, but I was trying to figure out how do I get there.
What's the path, right? And then once I started the channel and once I started to see some traction, I was like, oh I see this could work, this makes sense. And it was a light bulb moment where I'm like, Okay, this is a path that actually connects.
Cause for the longest time I couldn't find a path That connected to that ideal dream life. So once I felt that light bulb and that connection, Then it gave me motivation to just work really hard towards this channel and building it up. And that's another story on its own that I have told in other videos, I'll link down below, like the Lavendaire story.
Once you know, you know, I hope this video gave you the guidance that you needed. I hope that you continue on this path with self-love and confidence. It's okay to not have it figured out.
It's okay to not know what you wanna do because even if you feel like you know, it might change later on. Anyway, it's a continual exploration and that's what makes life beautiful. You are the artist and you continually paint and you make sure that this canvas, this life feels beautiful and meaningful to you.
And if any piece of it doesn't feel free to work on it, edit it, change it, or delete it. Whatever. I know today was pretty free-flowing.
But if you want practical exercises and a free workbook to figure out your life, I'll link you to the video and the workbook down below. Sending you so much love. And I'll see you in the next one.
Bye.
