Finding the Purpose: A Journey of Introspection and Self-Realization

Why do I love Calvin and Hobbes? Is it because reading it reminds me of my childhood days when life was much simpler? Or is it because its creator, Bill Watterson, does an excellent job of portraying the complexities of life through the innocent eyes of a six-year-old? While I am not sure about the answer to that question often I, just like Calvin, find myself wondering about the purpose of my existence. The last nine months of my life at the Mays Business School have offered some vital clues to that puzzle and I now feel that I am a lot closer to solving the puzzle than I ever was.

Self awareness is a critical precursor to deciphering one’s role in the circle of life. Being self aware means knowing certain inherent things such as your strengths, weaknesses, sources of motivation, etc. However, most of us are not tuned to the voices within us that often tell us very clearly where our strengths and weaknesses lie. Hence, it is a good idea to take a trip into your inner world to find out certain truths about yourself that we commonly feel that we have no time for in our day-to-day life. It is this journey into the realm of one’s mind that is one of the most rewarding and exciting trips that a person can ever undertake. For me this journey was punctuated by numerous aha moments as I unraveled facts about myself one-by-one.

Undertaking this journey would have been a lot tougher, though not impossible, without the tools that were at my disposal such as the Birkman, the energize/drain journal, and the StrengthsQuest assessment. These tools gave me valuable feedback that helped me both, reaffirm some views about myself and also question some things about myself that I always thought were true. Overall, I am extremely pleased that I got an opportunity to undertake these assessments as it has made me more aware of my strengths and shortcomings.

I always knew that some of my biggest strengths are communication, positivity, strategic thinking, and my ability to turn thoughts into action (activator). However, my biggest strength, as pointed out by the StrengthsQuest assessment was input – indicating an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a desire to learn new things. Now that I think of it, I realize that I have always been a person who can spend hours at a stretch surfing the internet and reading about things as diverse as Roman history to the latest developments in the field of medicine. I can recall that I once told my supervisor at my previous job that I would rather have a “broad-and-shallow” knowledge base rather than a “narrow-and-deep” focus, while justifying my candidature for a new job profile within our organization.

A complaint that I had with my software job was that it did not offer me enough opportunities to learn new things on a day-to-day basis outside of the world of technology. Realizing the fact that a typical software development job would never be able to offer the continuous sense of novelty that I seek, I decided to get an MBA to facilitate a career shift into the world of media and advertising where opportunities for continuous and diverse learning would be far greater. Somehow, I have always been reasonably good with numbers and technology despite my dislike for jobs and courses that involve detailed technical and numerical analysis. When I decided to make a career shift, I was plagued by the concern that was I leaving something that I am good at, only in the hope of catching a unicorn? Looking at the StrengthsQuest assessment (that did not list ‘analytical’ as my top strengths) gives me a tremendous surge of confidence that I took the right decision and has also opened the doors of my mind to consider some career options that I had previously not thought of.

I remember my father telling me about a cognitive psychological tool called the ‘Johari Window’ when I was a child. That was when I came to know that there are things about people that neither they nor the people around them know (the fourth quadrant), and that thought made me extremely uncomfortable. Being the inquisitive person that I am, it has always been my endeavor to learn as much about myself as I can possibly learn by seeking constant input from the people around me. For a person who is obsessed with learning something new about the world every day, it is not shocking that he is equally obsessed about learning new things about himself!

None of my other strengths surprised me and were largely expected. My past record speaks for itself and clearly indicates that communication, positivity, strategic thinking, and my ability to turn thoughts into action are indeed my biggest strengths. The past nine months in a business school have encouraged me to keep walking on the path that I have chosen and have convinced me even more that I am playing to my strengths. Encouraged by this positive reinforcement of my self-evaluation, I see no need to readjust my career plans. I strongly believe that we are all born to accomplish something. Before we can do that, we need to have a clear goal so that we can work towards it. Identifying the goal is the toughest part of the job, and sadly this is the part that most of us fail in. Someone once said that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” In my opinion, the first step is getting to know yourself and chalking out a career path that is in perfect harmony with one’s core strengths because therein lies the key to happiness, satisfaction, and success. All one has to do to achieve the aforesaid is to pay a little more attention to the details, just like Calvin.