Overextending yourself..
I am the type of person that really enjoys learning and picking up new skills. I think skills are the keystone of any ambitious individual who wants to better their situation. There are many ways skills translate into our everyday lives, but the process of acquiring skills (especially high leverage skills), can be difficult to achieve without real world experience. Yes, you can be a hobbyist and love the action of writing. Yet, if you are ambitious and think that writing can be used to let you earn a voice within society, then having the skill of writing is very useful. Writing comes in all shapes and sizes, and the more you practice each shape and size, the more you hone the overall ability to write. The issue is, finding more complex writing projects often requires finding a way to get yourself in front of people that will help get you there.
Leading to my first point about overextending yourself. When you want to acquire a skill, typically the best way to do so is to have a mentorship of some sort. This can be an author, a role model, or some guy you met at the book store. The mentorship process allows you to learn from someone that knows more than you, and ideally you get to adapt your own perspective to their teachings. Now say your mentor is a writer for the Daily Mail, or even a lesser known newspaper publisher. He says you get the opportunity to write a piece once a month, but the catch is that it’s unpaid, and that it’ll be on a topic you aren’t really interested in working on. In all accounts I think we should take the mentor up on the assignment. As we challenge ourselves in positions that don’t quite fit our true calling, we learn to adapt. Through this phase you have to think outside of the box, often challenging your own beliefs in the hopes you find your own voice and style. The more opportunities you get to see the spotlight of what could be eventually, the more opportunity you have to let your voice be heard. The issue is knowing when you’ve overextended yourself, and knowing when it’s time to let that root go. This is very difficult and often painful; in many ways it is like killing a piece of yourself. We run the risk of overextending ourselves when our skills don’t align with where our ambitions hold us to, because we don’t have the credibility yet to do it on our own.
Often the beauty of having a mentor is that they have already walked a road that was unknown to them at one point in their career, and with their advice you can use it and grow with it as they once did. The issue with a mentor is that each of us are unique, and each of our perspectives should be heard. Knowing when your ambitions become your mentor's ambitions is incredibly subtle, but as soon as this happens it’s time to step aside. You have officially overextended yourself. The reason we let these roots go is because it will ultimately help us grow. We get to learn, we get to apply, and we get to fail without any real consequences. As our skills get more and more honed in on what is best for us as individuals, we then need to try and branch out into new soil. This cyclical process is fundamental for gaining skills with leverage, and ultimately can be the guiding force for realizing your ambitions. I think the reason most people like staying in these positions is because, to some degree, there is a level of comfort if you find the right mentor, that makes it extremely difficult to let go of.
The other point I have about overextending yourself is when you are doing work from the heart, versus work that should be for your own personal gain. Now, doing work from the heart is the purest type of work, yet if the person you are working for is gaining something from the byproduct of the work you are doing, then you’ve overextended yourself. If you aren’t growing or gaining something for your efforts, then the person you are working for is not treating you fairly and/or you didn’t recognize that you overextended yourself. There’s a point in which you have to look internally and ask yourself why. Why did you pick up the work in the first place? Why have you not been rewarded for your efforts? Why are you still working for this person? If you can answer all those questions without hesitations and you’re happy with where you are at, then you probably haven’t overextended yourself. I often see that the people that get hurt by overextension are the people that are givers. They give because it makes them feel good, and often if you are dealing with someone who can’t reciprocate it, then they take advantage. You are acting out of selflessness, yet you also leave yourself to be really vulnerable to manipulation and getting taken advantage of.
Obviously I’m writing this because I haven’t quite learned my lessons. Getting burned is the worst, but now I know that cutting those roots off will help me grow.
Thanks for reading.
With love,
Kai
Weekly Poem:
The difference between
Right and Wrong
Winning and Losing
Happiness and Depression
Is one's ability to cut off the things that don’t work for them and move on
