Clarity On Fire

Have you ever met someone who’s always known what they wanted to do? They were 5 years old and sure they’d be a writer or a nurse or an engineer, went and did exactly that, and are still doing it to this day? You probably have. And while those people didn’t set out to make the rest of us feel bad … it sort of happens inadvertently, doesn’t it? Liz Gilbert (the author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic) calls these people “jackhammers.” As in, they drill down with mega-focus on one thing that they’re really passionate about and they hammer away at it forever. She’s a self-admitted jackhammer, herself, when it comes to being a writer. She gave a talk a few years ago (definitely worth a listen) about how she mistakenly assumed that everyone was like this. Not only did she realize that she was dead wrong, but she had no idea how badly non-jackhammers often feel about themselves. There are a whole lot of us who think there must be something wrong if we don’t have an all-consuming passion that we’re mega-focused on f