Saturday, March 17, 2007

Pitstop & Sanity Check At 30

I turned 30 last week. Aside the celebrations, I took this day as a milestone, and an opportunity for sanity checks. How happy am I with the course of life? In one word: happy. In two words: VERY happy.

Some say it's wrong to divide your life to periods of time, like decades. They say it makes the end visible. Others quote the Roman poet Horace: "carpe diem" ("seize the day"). I tend to take the road in the middle; summarize the past, plan the near future, and leave the rest to the unknown.
The most significant thing in summarizing my past, is what I have learned about myself. Today, I can answer some basic questions:
  1. Who am I? What is special about me? What characterizes me the most?
  2. What do I do best?
  3. What do I like doing most?
  4. What are my weaknesses?
  5. What are my top 3 ambitions in life?
As these questions seem trivial, getting to the truth was not easy for me. It was a long process of self investigation throughout the years. The idea was not to list long answers, but to find a single answer to each question. Unique enough to distinguish myself from the others, but general enough to catch all the correct answers. For example, my answer to question 2 (and the same to question 3) was "creating". I'm not sure that most of the people aged 30 (or even older), can answer these questions today with a true answer; not what THEY think is the answer, but the real answer that reflects reality.
Try answering these questions, and see if your answers reflect reality: take everything that you do best. Is your answer to question 2 the common ground for all of them? Think of all the things you do in your spare time. Is that your answer to question 3? In a job interview, when the interviewers asks you to tell about yourself. Will you answer what you answered to questions 1-4? Think of what you do most of your time - is that helping reaching your ambitions of question 5?

Food for thought.

Boaz.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Question is - what's more important: the invastigation process or reaching the answers?

Anonymous said...

Good questions, bro. Fine and true answers as well. Courageous and smart as usual. Keep on the good work and the good life

Unknown said...

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Unknown said...

Hi Boaz,
I found you thru linkedin and i would like to discuss a new internet project with you
My name is Yoav http://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavyy
please contact me at yoavyy@gmail.com