Finding Your Gift In Life

Start With Your Interests Only— What subject or subjects are you good in? What brings a smile to your face? Of course your gift does not have to be singing, dancing, being a great athlete or those subjects we tend to always associate with greatness, fame, or someone who society deems as the most talented or “gifted”. No, your gift could come in a variety of subjects; some simple and others complex. I had a friend who loved barns–he loved the wood and the smell of them. When he became an adult he started a company which would tear down old barns for free so long as he could have all the wood from it, then he used the beautiful aged barn wood to make furniture and flooring selling them all over the world–many were bought by famous people. He had found his gift because his business is now worth well over a million dollars and he’s even been featured in many national magazines. My mother’s gift was prayer. If anyone was sick it was my mother whom they’d seek to pray for them. To be exact, her gift wasn’t really the act of prayer but of compassion and caring for other people. Not a year goes by that someone doesn’t stop me on the street and say to me, you know your mother visited my mother in the nursing home and how much that meant to them. My 95 year old grandmother’s gift was her garden. She has grown and canned all her life, feeding half the neighborhood with her yield each summer. All of us could brainstorm now on those we know who have taken a simple gift and made good with it; that’s the easy part. The harder thing to do is to identify this gift within ourselves. Which brings us to the next step:

Identify What Makes You Happy— Picture yourself for a moment on a deserted island with no peers or real world pressures to hold you back; but with only the things you love to do around you. What would you bring with you to a place like this? My father would bring his tools and he’d build himself a grand house. Yours maybe something as simple as writing, baking, or growing flowers. Whatever it is you’d see yourself doing in a place such as this with no other distractions—that is your gift. What leads us away from true joy in life is that we stop using our gifts convincing ourselves that working 9 to 5 and keeping up with the Jones’s is a better way to live. Living day to day further and further away from happiness seems to be a constant struggle for us here in reality, yet why can’t it be the same for us here in real life as it would be for us living on our fantasy island? (Da plane, Da plane:) (Couldn’t resist..those not old enough to get that—Google it!) The odd thing is why would we ever do something that made us unhappy in the first place? Yet, it seems like everyone you talk to is miserable with their life, job, spouse, status in life; lack of this lack of that—Until everyone just gives up and leads a quiet life of desperation. So why not start living in your gift now, instead of living in your misery?

Once You’ve Found it—Now what? The key to living in your gift is starting small. Next weekend or the next day off you have, make yourself a little promise that you’ll spend a hour or so that day doing what you love to do. As you become happier by doing this, add time to this daily until the best part of your day is doing what you love to do. I know what you’re thinking–I can’t possible do this I’m dating, have kids, working, am re-married, too old—whatever the excuse maybe, this is only an excuse. We all have an hour or two daily to give and you do as well.

Jump—The great comedian Steve Harvey spoke to his audience before a show he was about to tape about how you have to jump in life in order to truly live. He said that even though you jump, your parachute might not open right away and you’ll certainly get some scraps and bruises on the way down, but it WILL open one day. I will let you listen to his whole speech below, but will leave you with something I heard someone once say that really spoke to me, he said , “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Your gift is waiting for you to re-discover. Do what you love and the money, happiness, and joy you’ve been waiting for will certainly follow. It’s time for you to Jump.