CC#4: Do you know what you want?

Good evening fellow members and guests,


Do you know what you want to do with your life? Show me your hand if you think you do.
Thank you.


I started to think about
what I want to do with my life, when I realized that
I don’t know what I want!

When I first discovered that
I don’t know what I want, I doubted my dreams, I felt insecure. The feeling of sailing alone in a choppy ocean and not knowing where you are leading to is scary.


But now I realize that
that was a turning point in my life. Since then, I gradually learned that nobody can teach us what we want. You just stumble upon it. The more you stumble, the more you get to taste the actual experience of things that you
want.

Of course, in the process of  trial and error, there will be hard time.
There were countless times when I was lost, confused and helpless. There were times when my dreams just seem to be too intangible and unattainable. There were times that I wished a fortune teller could just pop up and tell me what to do next? Though, i believe life is not that easy and it never works that way.


If you
ask me now, do I really know what I want to do with my life. The answer is NO! Not yet.
But I’m not going to just sit and wait. I need to take my fate in my own hands.
So I try to be open-minded whenever an opportunity presented at my doorstep.
Like an opportunist, I take advantage to opportunities and I’m receptive
towards new suggestions and ideas.


Who says
an architecture graduate has to be an architect for the rest of his life?


But what
if opportunity doesn’t knock? You go ahead and build a door! You prepare yourself for future opportunities. You never stop learning and improving yourself while you are
waiting for your time to shine. This is how I think I should get myself ready. Because I remember, i will never be ready for
anything but i can be ready enough. That is also the reason why I join
Toastmasters. I believe by the time a real opportunity arrives, I can be ready
enough to take the chance, make a change and breakaway.


Ladies and gentlemen,


In order
to know what I really want, I practice the Elimination by Aspects model. It is
a very easy and yet efficient method like what you do when you are given an
objective question with multiple choice answers. You evaluate each option one
characteristic at a time, and  eliminate the
option that fails to meet the criteria you have established. Eventually you will
arrive with just one alternative.


Likewise,
in our life, whether you realise it or not, we do the same thing. When you were a young child,
your parents would probably send you to drawing class, piano lessons,
taekwando lesson, calligraphy class, so on and so forth. As you grow older you get to know
things that you don’t like. You started to giving up on your piano lesson,
calligraphy class and others and you venture into new hobbies, new sports, new
things. You get to understand where your passion lies after you really taste it.
And hence you get closer to what you want in your life.


 Fellow members and guests,


Like most of you, I’m slowly but surely
learning what I want, and I only began to learn, really learn, once I discovered that I don’t
already know what I want.


So now
think about this again, “Do you really know what you want?”