Throw out the rule book, stop defining your choices by “traditional wisdom,” and you can create the life you truly desire.
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“This is a bad idea,” is what the little voice in our head will whisper just before we do something stupid, bad for us, or unnatural.
Unfortunately, my little voice went on strike for years. As a result, he is really out of practice and shy today. He wasn’t around to tell me that the proper course for my life was to get my degree, spend my early twenties partying before getting that stable job, spend two years engaged, get married just before 30 and spend my life quietly waiting to retire. Because of the poor labor relations between me and my little voice, I have accrued a pile of mistakes that deviate from that timeline. Inside of this pile of mistakes though are some of the jewels of my life. Had my little voice not been disgruntled, I wouldn’t have gone through with some of the contrary things that have made my life so rich today. Here are three of the things I was told were mistakes, which turned out to be perfect.
Getting married so soon.
According to this article form Fatherly.com, the average age which men get married in my state is 28.1. If you are from Utah the bar is raised, (or lowered, depending on your point of view) to 25, the youngest age at which men get married on average. Not willing to be outdone by anyone in Utah, I opted to get married at 21. Obviously, much too young to get married, unless one had spent an incredible amount of time getting to know the other person.
I thought 6 months was that incredible amount of time, and I was right.
… I didn’t find one article, study or rant where the author proved that the amount of time a couple dates corresponds to the length of their marriage.
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“Dude, you don’t even know her. I have been dating my fiancé for over a year now and I’m still not sure.” Came the comment from my closest friend at the time, (who is now divorced). Not only were we much too young in the eyes of the troubled relationships around us, but we certainly didn’t know each other well enough to maintain a marriage. But, do we really ever know each other well enough to maintain a marriage?
Do we know how the other person will react when the market crashes and our incomes are gone if we haven’t yet lived through it? What will life look like when an in-law goes to jail for a substance abuse problem while at the same time one of us is trying to get off the ultra-addictive pain medication that was prescribed for a surgery. Do we have to know how every situation plays out before we get married?
In a search on the internet (the place where all truth lives) for “indicators of a lasting marriage”, I didn’t find one article, study or rant where the author proved that the amount of time a couple dates corresponds to the length of their marriage. In this study I finally found from The San Diego Divorce Center, the first sentence of the article says “It’s possible to have a happy marriage regardless of how long you dated, according to Ted Huston, a professor of human ecology and psychology based at the University of Texas.”
They go on to try and break down marriage success to courtship time but really only succeed in explaining that what you do when you date is much more important than how long you date. My marriage has worked for two reasons.
- I am lucky to have her.
- I am lucky to have her.
Those two reasons are why I knew I needed to marry her right away, and part of why it has lasted.
Quit that good job.
Have you ever watched some jerk walk away from a career or job that you would love? I can think of four times I have been that jerk. I have watched people grow disappointment and disgust over my decision to leave jobs they thought were great. This revolution of freelancing and entrepreneurship that we are watching is the answer to my career prayers, but I have been working for over 21 years. I knew that I wanted freedom, not just from a boss but freedom to do whatever I wanted. Today if you tell someone that your job is to draw cartoons and study the behavior of the South African dung beetle online, they get it. You are peripatetic and have found a cool way to make a living doing work you love. They may feel a little weird about your love of dung beetles but, to each their own. In 1998, that wasn’t the case.
I don’t like security and seniority. Neither do you, and I can prove it.
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I hated the things that jobs offered. What everyone else called security and stability, translated to “doing the same boring thing every day” in my mind. Seniority was the thing that people wanted to have at their work, but to me it was the thing that drove mediocrity.
I don’t like security and seniority. Neither do you, and I can prove it.
Security and seniority equates to the people who have been there the longest continuing to do what they are doing. Once in the last 12 years we, as a country, have elected a president who had seniority and would continue with the status quo, that you hated. Seniority and security were the things you voted against when you cast your vote for the losing candidate. (The year that this happened is a totally different article.)
The way you felt when the other candidate won is exactly how I feel after sitting in the cesspool of average toxicity that these places create. It drives me crazy to watch a leader hold their nose and ignore a problem in the company because “that’s the way it’s always done,” or they could get a stern talking to if they disrupt the flow. I never learned to tolerate this, which would have been a problem in 1964. Fortunately for me this wasn’t 1964.
There is not much room in the media for the man who considers other points of view, can think his way through the myriad of changes we are facing and who is strong enough to stand up and say exactly how he feels without trampling on everyone else.
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I watched (and am watching) as the world chewed up the giant purveyors of poor culture. I feel like a part of the revolution which is giving voice to the opinion that we don’t want to do as little as possible, for as much as you can afford to pay us, for our entire lives. We want to make a contribution, to leave our mark on the world and maybe make a dent.
I could never do that in the old definition of the “good jobs” which I have routinely quit.
Put myself out there.
Men my age aren’t supposed to talk about their feelings, try to make sense of the world and stand up for good masculine qualities like I try to do. The media would have us either be the bumbling idiot who comes home from work, oblivious to the things going on around him, or the thug that professional sports have put on a pedestal for our youth to emulate. There is not much room in the media for the man who considers other points of view, can think his way through the myriad of changes we are facing and who is strong enough to stand up and say exactly how he feels without trampling on everyone else. We aren’t supposed to have an intelligent, unique point of view, and if we do, our job is to hide it behind a wall of some category.
Democrat or Republican, blue collar or white collar, faithful or atheist, rap or country (okay, those last two are the same), but the reality is most of us are somewhere in between. Most of us don’t want to be defined by our roughest edges. We are a little Ray Romano and a bit of Lil Wayne. We want to go outside the lines, stand up to average and speak up about what matters to us. It is easy to toe the line of some rule book, to do what everyone expects and to be just like the guy who came before. But I put my thoughts out there because I know that we are supposed to push the boundaries, try new things and raise the bar for what is expected of us. This never happens without making a few mistakes. And sometimes those mistakes turn into the best things we’ve ever done.
What mistakes are you willing to make?
Also by John Henderson
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Photo: Pixabay
John, your articles are always amazing! Thanks for speaking the truth in such an open way. There are far too many people and things that are trying to herd us like cattle into mediocrity. You have to be someone willing to think and buck the status quo. Thanks again for this great reminder.
Another great article John! Obviously those “mistakes” were anything but. I look back at things I would’ve done differently and realize they contributed to who I am today so I wouldn’t change them.