The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

December 27Experimental Truth

I somehow cling to the strange fancy, that, in all persons, hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult properties—as in some plants and minerals—which by some happy but very rare accident (as bronze was discovered by the melting of the iron and brass at the burning of Corinth) may chance to be called forth here on earth; not entirely waiting for their better discovery in the more congenial, blessed atmosphere of heaven.

Herman Melville—Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)

Do you ever sense that you have one true calling, that we all have one true calling, even if we never quite settle into it?

That instead of telling life what we are meant to do, maybe we should be asking and listening for what life hopes to do with us?

Some do this without knowing and one day wake up to realize, through the gift of hindsight, they are doing something they couldn't not do. Others, still under the spell of what they were taught by someone else, struggle to live up to what's expected of them.

What if we were able to view our lives as one giant experiment in finding our calling? So that everything wasn't necessarily good or bad but a chance to ask, “What truth is life telling me here?”

Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, titled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, promoted the idea that life is a series of experiments. An experiment is defined as a success if something is learned as a result of an experiment. So, Gandhi was able to reframe past and future events not as ...