#29 To complete, not to compete
We want to leave mark, but which target we are going to hit?
Happy Monday! The new normal has begun as a habit for us with bunch of meetings at work and assignments at the university. This seems familiar as it’s used to be. Just remember to keep your safe distance, sanitize and wash your hand everywhere you go!
In the last edition of Salmon Mentai, Meiska was writing about her tribute to Chadwick Boseman, and Elsa was writing about her campus orientation experience. Click here in case you missed it.
Monday is a #SalMonday time! Every Monday we let our friends to give us a theme to write. #SalMonday stimulates us to keep consistently writing and hopefully you will be inspired and diversify your point of views.
Today’s Salmonday is coming from a friend of Meiska and Elsa in the undergraduate, Muhammad Abdullah Mujahid! He is a husband and a father, and an Export Marketing Manager. He brought a topic for us:
“How do you find your life purpose? How to be on track with your purpose like you are now?”
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Meiska
Jahid was our classmate in college. He was also our class “leader” that made him close and easily connected with anybody. Not only that, he’s also smart that was sent for student exchange programme in Thailand for one term! I guess this experience brought him to work at export department and made him travel the world! I was so happy one day Jahid reached out to me and said he followed every newsletter from us! Haha
Actually when I first asked him to be our #SalMonday guess, he took a while to get us this theme. Strangely, sometimes I question this topic too with myself. Why am I working here? How do I get here? How far am I still aiming for my dreams? Seriously, it’s confusing. Maybe it’s my calling? Because I remembered when my senior asked me, what I wanted to be, I said I wanted to work for football —not knowing how I could get there let alone what kind of job I’m gonna get. He is the only person in my life who asked me that.
I only aim at one thing and that is sports. No matter what and how it should’ve started, it’s the only thing I want to do. I think that’s what Jahid and other people think of me? I’m familiar with sports and all back then, and now they see me working for it. I still remembered the broadcasted message of the vacancy that I applied to, and for the first time in my life, I was never so sure myself that I would pass. Truthfully, to finally come at this point, I never get anything easy, either. It took more than just persistence and a leap of faith! It took all of me.
Of course my life purpose doesn’t stop here, and there are many more things I want to achieve and impacts I want to radiate! There are times I think I have completed a task and feel so great about my job and myself, but it doesn’t take long to stop that. A few hours later, a more complicated task await and it always takes more than what I have before. I guess that’s how you level up in life and adulthood works anyway? We’re only gonna get stronger.
Elsa
Jahid is the friendliest person I ever met. We worked together several times for welcoming international students to our university. The bond is even stronger since I am also a friend of his wife before they were married. To see them as a husband and wife now, together with Arkaan, their child, is lovely!
I have started to have one mentee, it has been two months running for the mentorship so far. She is from Indonesia, she studies Food Science and Technology in the same university as myself, and she is five years younger than me. My intention to have a mentee was simple, I just want to pay it forward. I try to unleash her potential, and prepare her for career environment after campus life. In short, I want her to have an elder sister to whom she can ask for advice, or just to share her difficulties in her middle twenties age.
In our last session, she asked how I could cope with my difficulties and how I could achieve ‘everything that people wanted’. I was confused because I did not feel that way. To be honest, what I have done so far was just to have close friends who were really ambitious, and I was driven by their spirit. I am not a driven-dominant person myself. I am a typical person who choose things based on the available options, not by what things I do really want to do. I am ‘love what I do’ person, rather than ‘do what I love’ person.
Having a session with her is also a self-development for me. Now I become aware of myself. I do stop and think, what I do so far might be useful for others to find their way in their own life. I can share two things:
Choose your own game
Usually people are stuck to define their life because they think it should be something grand. It doesn’t run that way, life starts from a small step. My small step was to choose Food Science and Technology in undergraduate, it was actually an unplanned game in my life (because I was intended to go for a graphic design university but I couldn’t). I consciously decided to continue in this field and took serious on it. I want the ‘food technologist’ become something people perceive about me. My focus then has brought me to what I am now. My life is like many dots in a linear regression— there are a lot of positive and negatives dots along the way of my life, but then I’m surprised from a helicopter view, the gradient is positive. Now I can step further to choose one more focus in my life, the arts.
Do not undervalue yourself
This is also my list to do because I am really bad at this matter, I am still learning not to undervalue myself! It is even funny that I still got this feedback from my summer internship program (that means I have been undervaluing myself until this month, so I haven’t changed that much!).
What I usually do to value myself more is trying to talk more, or to action more because action speaks louder than word. Or, as simple as I see this meme!
What about you? Have you found your life purpose? Write your experience by leaving comments here!
“To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.” ― Johann Gottfried Herder
