My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [20]
CHANGING DIRECTION
By the end of the semester, Denise saw a path that she had not allowed herself to see before. She realized helping kids made her heart dance. She transferred into the College of Education to become a science teacher. Since graduating college, she has taught science at an inner-city middle school, an affluent suburban junior high school, and now is a thirty-three-year-old principal in a rural school district. More than 30 percent of her students are in Special Education programs.
At night, Denise still pursues one opportunity she never imagined in her college days. The former business school student, who almost failed out of her first college semester, is now in the second year of a Ph.D. program. Her doctoral focus, fittingly, is on closing the achievement gap in public education. She wants to help kids from all backgrounds succeed—whether they bowl blind or are simply the first of eighteen cousins to go to college.
By opening her eyes to consider opportunities outside of business school, Denise discovered her Future Picture (see Chapter 2)—a career in education. She also found her passion (see Chapter 3)—that excitement and buzz you feel when you are living your true, authentic purpose. This rewarding career choice was always there, but at first Denise could not detect it. It took a bounced reality check to lead her to a thirteen-year-old blind bowler named Bobby who showed her what she was missing. By learning to experience the world through Bobby’s perspective, Denise found her own path to meaning.
OPPORTUNITY SURROUNDS YOU
From the moment you hit the snooze button on your alarm clock to the hour you doze off watching late-night TV, opportunity is always around you. Opportunity is with you in your car on your morning commute. Opportunity is with you on your breaks during work when you call friends and family and surf the Internet. Opportunity is the seed that inspires your brief daydreams and long evenings gazing up at the stars.
Look around you now: The electricity that powers the stores near you was once just an opportunity. The computer you have come to rely on was once just an opportunity. The cell phone that never leaves your ear except to take pictures was once just an opportunity. So is the car you drive, country where you live, clothes you wear, music you enjoy, friends you make, places you travel, and memories you create.
When you recognize that opportunity doesn’t come in one shape, size, color, degree, or last name, you can turn “randomly” bumping into a stranger at lunch into a lifelong friendship or maybe even your true love. You can convert a crazy invention that comes to you in the middle of the night into a thriving billion-dollar business. You can turn a single volunteer experience helping a blind kid learn to bowl into a lifelong calling. But to make these leaps of insight, innovation, courage, and meaning, you must first believe that opportunity exists all around you all the time.
Every second of your life contains the raw ingredients you need to seize an opportunity that will make your life more rewarding. If you disagree with me about the abundance of opportunity in the world, it’s only because your mind currently keeps you from seeing it. When you learn how to teach your eyes to spot the opportunity in the world, you’ll be shocked that you didn’t see it before!
Like Denise, you might have a similarly blinding view of the opportunities available to you based on what you have personally or professionally experienced, what you have learned in school, and what friends and family have told you. Although some twentysomethings have known since they were eight years old what their calling is, you shouldn’t feel confined to only one direction because you think that’s the best you can do with what you have. This is absolutely the case if you are being pushed down a path that isn’t making you feel happy, inspired, purposeful, and challenged. If you are willing to open yourself to the idea that there is an opportunity in the world