“A-a-aye, I’m on vacation, Every single day ’cause I love my occupation… A-a-aye, I’m on vacation – If you don’t like your life, then you should go and change it!” — Jared Watson, Dirty Heads song writer.
Ever since I was introduced to that song from a friend of mine a few months ago, I have probably sent it to 100 different leaders and entrepreneur friends of mine. And listened to it myself at least that many times. I’ll even catch my 9 year old son walking around the house singing it sometimes! The premise of the song is this. Every day of my life is like a vacation, because what I do is not work. Yes, it took hard work and grit to get me where I am at today, but even then, I had a calling on my life, I was passionate about what I was doing, I may have not enjoyed the suck at the time, but it helped mold me into the leader I am today! And if you DON’T love what you do, then change it! Life is too darn short! Not sure if that is what Jared Watson had in mind when he wrote it, but that is how I am paraphrasing it!
Singer / Songwriter Marc Anthony said it like this… “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life”.
Each of us has some type of a picture in mind of what we want our life to look like(at least those of us leaders focused on daily personal growth). What we want our family to look like(married/kids), and yes, from an early age we often picture up images of what our house will be, cars we drive, and things we would like to obtain. In most people’s minds, success is something way off in the distance that they will run themselves ragged to get to – if they ever even get to it at all. I know for me, my vision of what personal success was 12 years ago when I turned 30 is absolutely completely different from what I’m living/seeing today. And it doesn’t look at all what you might think!
At one time, I viewed success as a place where I would arrive at some point in my life. I defined it as a process of a predetermined, worthwhile goal. But over time, I realized that the definition falls way short of the mark. As time has gone on in my leadership, marriage, fatherhood, spiritual, relational, and business journeys, I came to a different conclusion about success. All the traditional definitions either made success a destination to reach someday, or required some magic formula to obtain that being a once lost high school dropout kid from Flint Michigan, I’d more than likely never figure it out. Nor did I have high achieving mentors in my life pushing me or good examples to learn from. I shifted my focus and began to see success as my journey, an ongoing process of my continuous growth.
Here is what I learned… When you focus on enjoying and celebrating every milestone of your life’s journey, then you never have the problem of trying to “arrive” at some final destination. And you’ll never find yourself in a position where you’ve accomplished some final goal – only to discover that you’re still unfulfilled and searching for something else to do. And when you reach that point, you will be on vacation… Every. Single. Day. Because you’ll love what you’re doing and doing what you love!
God created every person on purpose for a purpose. Our responsibility – and our greatest joy – is to identify it. Finding our purpose requires us to seek to discover two things: our passion, and our gifts. What is the deep desire set in your heart, the thing that sets your soul on fire? What makes you cry? What do you get most excited about? And what are you really good at? NO ONE else in the world has exactly the same gifts, talents, background, or future that you do.
The journey will not look the same for everyone, because each of our purposes in life is different. What doesn’t change are the principles used to take the journey. They can be applied to every single aspect of your life (personal and work)… It doesn’t matter where you are now. You can learn and apply these ideas. And that said… I can guarantee you’ll start seeing and enjoying the true value of today and the rest of the journey. If there’s one (of a million) things having kiddos has taught me, it’s that life is moving by FAST. That said, there is not a day that goes by that I don’t want to live my life like I’m on vacation!
I couldn’t land the plane on this teaching without sharing the lyric video for “Vacation”! Crank it up and ENJOY!