Self-help

Like many other Americans pursuing a personal improvement project, I headed straight to the self-help section of the nearest Barnes & Noble, only to discover that we are a seriously troubled nation. Maybe we’re just more afflicted here in Southern California, but there's more shelf space devoted to tomes on fixing our lives than any other genre. Overwhelmed by choices, I soon realized that I needed a self-help book just to help me find a self-help book that might truly be helpful. 

There’s a book for nearly every aspect of your life that might need tweaking. I needed to decide which one was right for me. Did I want to become a highly effective person, find the color of my parachute, manage people and things in under a minute, awaken my inner giant, win friends and influence people, feel good, go with the flow, or just eat a frog?  There were too many choices; I was paralyzed. What if I didn’t pick the right book? Eating a frog is clearly the wrong choice if you simply want to feel good. Besides, then I would need a book to help me cook frogs.

Disappointed, I went home bookless. Surely the World Wide Web would help me find my passion. The bookstore was merely overwhelming, Google inundates, drowning you in a tsunami of search results in less than a second. Dejected, I was beginning to feel that self improvement was just too much damn work, so I decided to do something productive and wandered over to Facebook. There I found a link to a TED^* talk: How To Find And Do Work You Love, presented by Scott Dinsmore. Bingo! After watching the video I headed over to Scott's website and downloaded his 27 question workbook for finding your passion. It asks the same three questions 27 different ways, and by the time your done you might have killed off any passion that you had when you started. I gave it try anyway. I even thought about answering each question in it’s own post right here on Kellie’s World. Before you recoil in horror, I decided that that might not be such a good idea, except for question number 21, since it’s not a question for me, it’s a question for you. Here it is:

What do your friends always tell you you’d be good at, that you should do for a living?

The people who read my blog cover the full gamut of my relationships, from family and friends who know me well to denizens of the web who accidentally stumbled across my post Women Are Like Cars while searching Google for porn. (You should have seen what they were looking for when they landed on my Colonoscopy Trilogy.) Your responses will certainly be interesting, at least for me, maybe not so much for anyone else. Don’t be shy; tell me what you think in the comments below. And don’t be afraid about hurting my feelings. The Navy tested me for the presence of feelings on multiple occasions and the results always came back negative.

--------------------------------------------------------

^*If you’re not familiar with TED, their mission is to disseminate “Ideas Worth Spreading.” The talks are under twenty minutes and I haven’t seen a bad one yet.