Sweet Spot

What would you do if nobody paid you for it? Would you still sell houses or work on cars or do people’s taxes or deliver the news? Would you coach ball or drive a tractor or teach a class or build a boat? When your feet hit the floor in the morning, where is it that your heart can’t wait to go? 

Retrieved from www.mypremiumeurope.com

If you followed it where it led you, you might end up where you already are. Or you might find yourself someplace entirely different.  Some place you’ve never been or imagined you might go. But the corner you’ll find yourself in, if you chase the song in your heart, is your sweet spot. The place where all kinds of good collides.

If you’ve ever hit a golf ball clean, you know what the sweet spot feels like. It’s soft and yet solid. And it’s coated in sticky comeback juice. The ball soars as if it has wings, despite the effortlessness of the swing, and all that you can think about once you hit it, is that you can’t wait to do it again. That’s part of the magic that lives in the sweet spot. Being there never gets old. 

A fun and often trendy dinnertime conversation topic is what we might do if we won the lottery. If a sack of money the size of five lifetimes just fell out of the sky in our lap, what would we do with it? Almost everybody says, first, they’d give a lot away. We name the charity we’d give a windfall to or the foundation we would start.  And then… we would build a house here and buy a house there, and we’d go somewhere exotic at least once a year. We’d buy tickets to every major sporting championship… we’d buy our parents new homes and our kids new cars and, of course, we’d quit our jobs.

But then what? What would we DO?

Doing nothing is only fabulous when it’s done as a reprieve. 

Retrieved from www.nytimes.com

The Dalai Lama said we’re human beings, not human doings and I get it--running around being busy is not the point of life. But make no mistake about it:  people were born to be of use. We come out of the womb wired to work. “The pitcher cries for water to carry” says Marge Piercy, “and a person for work that is real.” We’re not built to lay on the beach all day regardless of the breathtaking views. We were created to contribute. To serve a purpose. But the conundrum we sometimes wrestle with is, how?

I used to tell my players to follow what they were good at until it ran into what they loved. The intersection would be their sweet spot, the place where they would thrive. But they often got snagged on the rough edges. There were always pieces of the whole that didn’t necessarily intrigue them. “Teachers have to grade papers,” they’d say. “Lawyers have to do research. To be a photographer, will I have to do math?“

Even fun isn’t fun all the time, I’d remind them. The point is what endures? After the annoyance (that part of the work you would like to live without) is gone, what’s still there? Does the spring in your step hang around? Non-stop enjoyment doesn’t equal fulfillment. Enjoyment is thin and flighty. Fulfillment is way sturdier and it doesn’t dissipate. Not all work is fun, even when it’s work you were born to do. But the enduring kind, the soul stirring kind, will fuel you long after it’s done-- regardless of who sees it, or who hears it, or how much somebody compensated you to do it. In the sweet spot, your heart will continue to swell.

We have so many options when it comes to choosing the work that we do. Unfortunately, a lot of time is wasted in reverie— thinking about what we are “meant to do,” wondering what we “could” do, debating about what we “should” do. But the sweet spot doesn’t come to you. You go find it. And the more you do, the more you’ll know. By doing lots of different things, you will learn to recognize, quite quickly, what strikes the band in your heart. That sound, once you learn to hear it, will most always lead you home.

The late pastor, Frederick Buechner, once said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That’s a lens most advisors fail to hand students when they plot their class schedules for the fall. But what a roadmap to the spot. The sweet place you live your way to by relentlessly following your heart.

P.S. "Come From The Heart” - Kathy Mattea