I sometimes hear people say that worrying about the future comes as second nature to them. So I reply, “If worrying is second nature, what’s your nature?”%u2028It’s time that, as a society, we all start asking these kinds of questions—and then, answering them. Living our first nature is living with openness, trust, and being our true Self in the present moment.
For those of you who insist on speaking of second nature instead of first, I ask you, what is it that you do that is second nature to you? What is that gift, or gifts, that are so natural to you that you express them in the world with such ease and grace that virtually everyone who comes into contact with it loves it?
For Luciano Pavarotti, it was singing and bringing in the sound of Heaven. For Michael Jordan, it was performing feats of aerial acrobatics with a basketball. For Robin Williams, it was making us laugh and cry with joy over his comic antics, manic mimics, and outrageous routines. You don’t have to be that kind of a superstar that your light shines throughout the planet, as theirs did. You can light up the world around you in smaller and quieter ways. Perhaps you can bake cookies that have people munching muchly and licking their chops sumptuously. Perhaps Nature has equipped you to fix almost any kind of equipment. Or beautify the garden outside your home.
Doing any of these things will fill your heart with joy. When you do them on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, it’s generally called a hobby. And it’s one of the ways that the Universe enriches the universe around you. This enrichment comes naturally to you, because it’s Nature acting through you.
If you take it one major step further you have the chance to enrich the world on a much larger scale. And to enrich your bank account, as well. That’s because the kind of step further that I’m proposing is taking what you love to do as a very part-time hobby that you find delight in, and extending it full time to serve others. That makes it a livelihood. On second thought, that second nature is really more of a When you take a hobby that you put a few hours a week into, and that pays you nothing in return because you’re not really serving people with it, and turn it into your work, you can then put 40 or more hours per week into it and serve many people. The other thing about this full-time “doin what comes natur’lly--as Irving Berlin put it in that you have the energy to give the world your very best. It’s hard to do what comes naturally after having given society what doesn’t come so naturally for 40 hours (or more) each week, plus perhaps a quarter more of that just getting to and from it. That’s because you don’t have that much energy or inspiration left after the depletion and perspiration of that “rent-paying” straight job.
That’s also the reason that a majority of Americans—and perhaps people from most industrialized countries—don’t enjoy what they do for a living. It’s also the reason that there’s an internationally successful restaurant chain dedicated to this phenomenon: it’s called TGI Fridays. Even an atheist would thank God for Friday if he didn’t like what he was doing for a living.
In the Breakthrough Coaching work that I do privately with clients who want to change their livelihood into a lovelihood, I take them through a 10-minute writing process that enables what’s deep in their hearts and souls that’s dying to be expressed in the world—actually, to be expressed in our world—to dawn in their consciousness. Then, like the dawn that brings light to the darkened heavens every morning, they can brighten their lives with the light of their soul, and brighten our world with their light.
When they allow themselves to transform what I call the Money Rejection Complex, they can let themselves be paid for this work, too. And they can then follow their bliss-and follow the traffic--to their nearby bank and deposit dozens of checks from their neighbors who are more than happy to pay them for what they do best, for doin’ what comes naturally.
