I love the feeling of seeing other people happy. To put it another way, it makes me happy to see people happy. It doesn’t take a long journey to see where this road leads:

People pleaser.

My word, the life I have lived as a people pleaser. I’ve felt happiness in doing so, but, in doing so (and we’ll get back to “serving others” as a people pleaser in another post) I am pretty sure I have never really explored who *I* am. Who am I? Who are any of us? This isn’t that kind of discussion. Let’s narrow it down.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

My answer has always been “A Husband and a Dad”. Family is important to me and I feel that I have a great one. I was raised with love, my parents were around, I was comfortable and at least 3 of my levels in the Maslow pyramid were taken care of.

I got a job to support the people that made me a Husband and a Dad. I am fortunate to be able to do just about anything in a manner considered “good enough”. So I ended up in a corporate job doing computer stuff and was able to carve out a living.

Commendable. Worthwhile. American. Duty. What-I-Was-Supposed-To-Do. SAFE.

Privilege note: I am aware of most of my privilege and am still learning where things are set up for me that I still have not realized after 4 decades of taking breaths.

With that disclaimer out in the open, I did what is safe. I walked on paths and drove on roads and visited places that others have walked/driven on/visited and reported back as safe. This is how I built my life. Ages ago when we were chasing dangerous animals in the wild and shelter was never guaranteed, safety was absolutely the way to go. Today, without food and a place to sleep, safety is absolutely the way to go. When I have all of my basic needs met, why play it safe? Because that is what I know. That is the wisdom of my tribe and I bought in.

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

So now I’m safe. I have a “steady” job. (Not a guaranteed job…no job is guaranteed.) I have an amazing wife. I have glorious children. I live in a beautiful place.

And yet…

I overspend. I eat/drink things that don’t make me feel great. I have to grind out my work everyday. Not the Garyvee-style grind. I mean the “why are we doing any of this this way when it barely matters”. And I’ve felt that in every corporate/organizational job that I’ve had. All of these places have missions (either financial or altruistic, though I believed those are entwined, another topic for later) and many people are there for reasons that sustain them.

Not me.

I constantly hear a voice, feel it in my gut, know it in my soul, that I’m not doing what I was made for. What I’m built for. What I can do to share my gifts with the world. And I consistently have ignored that call because it requires too much.

It requires me to own my path. Not to follow a safe path. It requires me to fail. At something. Because you can’t do something new without the possibility that you don’t have it figured out and that it might not be what you thought or had hoped. It requires me to take financial risk. How can you take financial risk when four people you love rely on you to eat and sleep indoors? It requires too much.

Or at least it did.

But now I’m at a crossroads of surviving and living.

I’ve been surviving for a long time. And I’m grateful to all of the experiences, privilege, people, and opportunities that have kept me going.

And I choose to live.

And living, for me, makes me no longer safe for work.