Stop Waiting For Someone To Show You What To Do

If you feel lost in life and don’t know what to do, this is for you

In America, children are usually raised to wait for adults to show them how to do things. Throughout K-12, teachers assign students homework and projects with rubrics and then assess student performance based on those rubrics. Then, in high school, we direct students to get jobs and university admission by filling out applications and waiting. And then, in university, more of the same — we apply to be admitted to classes, to programs, and to scholarships. Some universities even take it a step further, encouraging students to attend job fairs and enter into employment lotteries hosted by the school. They are shown exactly what to do, every step of the way.

It’s not that these students didn’t work hard. But there’s a difference between working hard and figuring out what to do for yourself. And people who go through this system never learn how to figure something out for themselves. They learn that whenever it’s time to go to the next level, an authority figure — a teacher, parent, or boss — will show up right on time, tell them what they need to do next, and walk them through the process. As a result, many people make it to their first job without ever learning how to figure something out for themselves.

There was a day and age where that was okay. In the age of corporate careers and lifelong positions, all you had to do was get your first job and then ascend through the ranks at whatever company you chose. Whenever you wanted a promotion, you pursued your boss and asked him what you needed to do.

We don’t live in that day and age anymore. We live in the gig economy, an economy where people in their twenties today will work 15 jobs or more, where an increasing number of positions are contractual or remote or both. In this economy, the ability to figure out what you need to do and figure out how to do it yourself, without a mentor, is what makes the difference between lifelong wealth and lifelong poverty.

Some people complain about this. They think we need to restructure the economy to bring back that stability. But when you think about it, that “stability” was extremely weird. Most humans throughout history have not lived with that kind of stability. Far from it. For most of human history, people were left to fend for themselves. Either they made their own way, or they did not. The “stability” of corporate life is the anomaly, not the economy we have now.

And anyway, the truly successful never abided this stability anyways. When Bill Gates started Microsoft, no one told him how to take Microsoft to a billion dollars. He figured that out on his own. The truly successful ignored “stability” and followed their dreams anyway.

So in our new economy, it’s no longer enough to just go along with the plan. Before we have the skills to do the job, we need the skills to figure out what job needs to be done, how to get the skills to do the job, and how to convince someone else we have those skills. In addition to being a great worker, we have to be our own agents and our own press people.

To someone who isn’t used to this, it sounds like a lot. But I think that’s okay. The gig economy can be stressful at times, but it’s also incredibly freeing. We have so much more control over our lives. We aren’t tied down to one company, location, or even line of work. We can become anything we want, do anything we want, wherever we want. The only thing stopping us is ourselves.

So stop waiting for someone to come tell you the next step in the plan. Stop waiting for the university, your boss, your teacher, a mentor, or someone else to step in and ‘show you the way.’ Get up, and go find the way for yourself.

Here’s how:

1. Search on Google “How to (become what you want to be/do what you want to do).”
2. Read every search result for three pages.
3. Search on Google “Best books for (becoming what you want to be/doing what you want to do).”
4. Buy the top 5 books (or rent them from your library) and read them all.
5. Figure out what these resources say your best next step is. (For instance, for a writer with no blog and no mailing list, the best next step is to start a blog and mailing list.)
6. Whatever it is, just do it. Don’t wait for a promise or a guarantee or for someone trusted to confirm it’s the right thing to do. Just do it.

If you do this, you’ll find that over the next 12 months, your life will change dramatically. Instead of feeling lost and adrift, you’ll know what to do. And because you’ll know what to do, you won’t be unmotivated anymore. When you wake up in the morning, you’ll know what you need to get done and you’ll be eager to start doing it. Soon, the results will start to show; instead of desperately submitting job applications with no responses, people will start to seek you out. Instead of emailing potential mentors with no reply, potential mentors will start to email you. Your life will change dramatically, all because you stopped waiting for someone to show you what to do.

“Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.”

― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

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