How to Find Your Life's Work: The Only Solution No One Talks About

AVAlexander Volchek

How do you find the very thing you were born to do? Anya, you're bringing up good topics today. Shall we explore this one? Your life's work. How to find your life's work, and how to do it very quickly. There's a really great solution, by the way. I think we'll definitely share it today: finding your life's work is very easy. I'll definitely give you a very simple solution. Not everyone may like it, but it's very simple.

AVAnna Volchek

Like many of your solutions.

AVAlexander Volchek

Let's take a look. By the way, the solution I'll give for finding your life's work is essentially the only possible solution. There are no others. I don't know any other solution. Do you know another one?

AVAnna Volchek

Well, once you hear it, everything else just falls away.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, everything else falls away. It's the only solution there can be. There is no other solution. You won't find another solution anywhere but in this video. You won't. I guarantee it—you won't.

AVAnna Volchek

This seems important for everyone: how to find yourself through what you do. Sometimes you've been doing something for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and you're even good at it. Your career is progressing, you earn good money, you have recognition in society. You definitely succeed at what you do, but something still isn't right. More precisely, it feels as if this isn't your life's work. Is there such a thing as your life's work? Can you find it? Can you even frame the question that way: “How do I find my life's work?”

AVAlexander Volchek

I like the question you asked at the very end, as a way to continue this topic. To continue this topic. The question itself, framing the question that way, is mistaken, because the very idea of finding your life's work implies that until you find it, you're living unhappily, you're not doing your own work, and your life isn't your own. What does “work” even mean here? What is your life's work? Your life's work is life. Right? Say we're talking about professional work. The very question of finding your life's work takes you away from the concept of life. That's a starting point for moving forward. You need to understand what, essentially, you want to feel at the end. Let's imagine the endpoint. What's the ideal scenario? You're asking for the ideal, right? How to find your life's work? Would you like me to give you the ideal scenario?

AVAnna Volchek

Go ahead.

AVAlexander Volchek

The ideal scenario.

AVAnna Volchek

Let's.

AVAlexander Volchek

The ideal scenario, the most ideal scenario, is that whatever I do is my life's work and gives me pleasure. Whatever I do is my life's work. Would that suit you? Imagine it: would you like to be in a state where whatever you do—

AVAnna Volchek

One hundred percent.

AVAlexander Volchek

Would you?

AVAnna Volchek

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Because someone will say, “No, that's bullshit. Can I still find my life's work?”

AVAnna Volchek

A hundred percent.

Yes, that really resonates with me.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, some people want to find their destiny and their calling. All right, once you've found your destiny, your calling, what comes next? Freedom, or disappointment? Development, or depression? What happens next? When it comes to your life's work, we both understand perfectly well what you want. Are you ready to find it? Imagine Tanya finds her life's work. It's absolutely amazing! But it's for five years.

AVAnna Volchek

It's limited.

AVAlexander Volchek

Well, probably limited. If you pose the question of finding your life's work, it's limited in any case. At the very least, there's a period before you find it, and at the very least, right now you think what you're doing isn't your life's work.

AVAnna Volchek

I think this question also starts when someone finishes school. For some reason, until children are, say, sixteen, people very often don't discuss it with them at all. Not everyone—I'm not saying everyone—but very often. Then there's some formal career assessment, and they choose a university. Let's take a very conventional path. Does that whole path have anything to do with your life's work?

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes.

AVAnna Volchek

Or nothing to do with it at all?

AVAlexander Volchek

Again, again. We've just found the ideal scenario. We'll talk about that path in a moment. We've found it, and that's fundamentally important. We know the ultimate solution, and apparently it's the only one.

Apparently it's the only one, right?

AVAnna Volchek

At least, I can't even see how you could refute it.

AVAlexander Volchek

It's the only one, right?

Because if we're going to search for our life's work instead of talking about what's here right now, we aren't constantly in that state. Essentially, that's where a person wants to get. You need to know that. You need to know that. The next question is: suppose we know this—how do we get there? What's the most ideal scenario? To get there right now, tomorrow. Wake up tomorrow and you're there. Tomorrow you have that job: it's been offered to you, or you've started that business, or for some reason you come to work and start really enjoying it. You feel, “This is my life's work.” And what you have to do there is carry bricks. You say, “I wasn't really planning to carry bricks. This doesn't seem like my life's work. It isn't what I wanted as a child.” Then the questions start: “What did you want as a child? What did you like? What did you want to do?”

AVAnna Volchek

You've brought up the example of bricks. There really are people—all of us, it doesn't matter—a great many people doing some kind of work and thinking, “I'll do this for a little while so that…” Or, “I'll suffer for a little while so that…” And at the same time, they're searching for their purpose, their work, their…

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, and there are different situations here. If a person feels that they just have to put up with it for a while, they tell themselves, “This isn't my life's work.” So let's move on again. We've understood the whole picture. Then we've understood that, essentially, we want to get there as quickly as possible. Now let's look at what happens if you don't get there quickly, if you don't get there right away. What happens if you don't get there right away? Could the search last thirty years?

AVAnna Volchek

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Could it happen that you never find your life's work?

It could. Here, a person needs to tell themselves very clearly and distinctly, quite calmly: “If I search for my life's work, there's a chance I'll never find it in my entire life.” That's a fact. Though what immediately comes to mind is someone meeting a woman and saying, “All right, I'll marry this one. What if there isn't another?” Or you look at your age: “I'm thirty-five already. I probably should.” A woman thinks, “I'm forty already. Maybe I'll agree to be with this one, in case there aren't any others. There weren't before. What if there aren't any again?” When you're young, it's usually different. At twenty, a woman says, “Oh! There's so much time ahead. So many different circumstances still to come. I still have a chance.” That's usually how it is, right?

AVAnna Volchek

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

That's usually how it is. It's a certain lack of awareness of cause and effect: why particular events happen, why some women and men get together and stay together for their whole lives, always. At eighteen, sixteen, fifteen, twenty. And someone else can't find anyone their entire life. What is that? There are reasons for it. So the only work you can do on your life's work is to start moving toward accepting life as a given. What does that mean? It means that any professional work that arises in the course of my life is my life's work.

AVAnna Volchek

How do you start?

AVAlexander Volchek

Because if we say our life's work is something separate, it turns out that in everything I'm doing, I'm not living. And if I'm not living, I don't exist. Let's look again at the word “hobby.” “Hobby” is an English word. I don't know where it came from, but it definitely isn't originally a Russian word. What is a hobby? It's defined very clearly: something you do that you like, that gives you pleasure, that you do in your free time—

AVAnna Volchek

Outside of work.

AVAlexander Volchek

Outside of work, and it doesn't earn you money. My first impulse is to say, “Am I understanding this correctly: by definition, I don't like my work, and by definition, I don't like my day-to-day life?”

AVAnna Volchek

Or that a hobby can't earn money.

AVAlexander Volchek

Am I understanding correctly that if I do something I love, adore, something that earns me money, that I enjoy and develop in, then it's somehow nonsense, somehow not right? Maybe there should be something else?

AVAnna Volchek

That's work.

AVAlexander Volchek

Could there be something else? Yes. Could you find something else? It seems to me my mother conveyed that message to me my entire life. My entire life: something else. And what's funny is that there are stereotypes about hobbies, about what a hobby is. Since I worked at the computer so much, it wasn't seen as a hobby. You say, “Wait, I'm studying programming, or computer systems, or networks. Studying networks.” We ran network cables in our apartment building. Remember? We ran networks between buildings and set everything up in the building. How is that different from a hobby where we painted pictures together? What's the difference? An illusion. We've invented an illusion and put it in place for ourselves. Again.

Put you in that position. Again, the very concept of your life's work: if I have a life, then everything I do is my life's work. Wouldn't anything else be absurd? Otherwise, I'm not living. Everything is my life's work. I'm making a video—that's my life's work. I worked as a programmer—that was my life's work. I was the CEO of Megaplan—that was my life's work. I became the owner of Business Molodost—that's my life's work. Here's what's important: “Your life's work? Wait a second, wait. It isn't for your whole life.” What could be for your whole life? Nothing can be for your whole life. I'll probably retire at some point, I don't know. And at the very beginning, I was little; I couldn't own a company. What do you mean, for my whole life? Companies don't necessarily have to last forever either. People invented this illusion to destroy a person.

AVAnna Volchek

Could you explain that? It isn't very clear why a person needed this. It seems to be a framework that all of us—or a great many of us—are living in, constantly—

AVAlexander Volchek

A hundred percent false.

AVAnna Volchek

Compelled to follow it, and it's false.

AVAlexander Volchek

From the outset, well—

AVAnna Volchek

What for? What's the reason?

AVAlexander Volchek

An illusion. There's no solution to that question. “Your life's work” immediately implies that your life is worthless. The parallel with a hobby is very apt here. It immediately implies that your life is worthless. Worthless by definition, damn it.

AVAnna Volchek

Sasha, what's the first step out of that framework, out of that illusion? What's the first step toward understanding that anything you're—

AVAlexander Volchek

The first thing you need to do.

AVAnna Volchek

Doing today is your—

AVAlexander Volchek

No, that isn't what you want to do. You don't want—you don't want to step out of an illusion. Look, stepping out of an illusion is one thing. Being in a particular state is another. You want to get into that state immediately, but you can't, because you know what job you have. You know your professional aspirations. You know your dreams. You know what you're doing alongside it. Say you have a job as a vice president at a large company, and you also have other activities. You study nutrition, for example, you work on health, and on food, and on something else, and something else again. There are lots of activities. They're all things you do too. So if you want to jump straight to the endpoint—wake up in the morning and everything is happy—that isn't the solution, and it isn't the starting point. The first thing is to understand what I'm saying theoretically. Why don't you need to understand it in practice? Our task, our task is to understand that your life's work isn't some invented niche: “Choose the right niche.” Your life's work—it can, by its very nature, be good or bad.

What do you associate your life's work with? Joy? Wonderful emotions? Happiness? What? A lot of money, or a little money?

AVAnna Volchek

All of that, and a sense of satisfaction too.

AVAlexander Volchek

Can your life's work involve loss? Can it involve earning little money? Can it involve disappointment?

Aha!

AVAnna Volchek

It can involve anything.

AVAlexander Volchek

Everything's changed. Actually, asking how to find your life's work is the illusion. A person doesn't even understand what they're looking for. All right, suppose you're looking for your life's work and it earns you a hell of a lot of money, you can work whenever you want, and you can do whatever tasks you want, entirely as you choose.

AVAnna Volchek

But that doesn't seem to be about the work itself.

AVAlexander Volchek

And you want something else as well.

AVAnna Volchek

It's more about a particular image.

AVAlexander Volchek

It's just a set of parameters.

AVAnna Volchek

A set of parameters.

AVAlexander Volchek

Parameters for some kind of work.

AVAnna Volchek

An activity.

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes, parameters. Just parameters for some activity. No problem. I'm not against that. Then the video title should be, “How do I find work where I do whatever I want?” What do I want? Whatever I want, that's what I want. You can do whatever you want. But you can't actually find that, can you? Tomorrow I might say, “I want to fly into space,” but I won't fly into space tomorrow. I want to own a company worth fifty trillion dollars, but I can't own it because no such company exists. But I want to! See, now we're heading into a kind of nonsense. So the fundamental thing, at the very beginning, is to recognize what's happening, and everything immediately becomes uninteresting. You can turn off the video. Why does it become uninteresting? What's next for the person watching? They think, “So what have we arrived at? My life's work is everything I do, and I might not like it.” Click! But that's the resolution, an incredible resolution of the question.

AVAnna Volchek

There's a great deal of value in that. When you hear it and accept it, there's a great deal of value in it. It's like those other topics you've discussed, I think, about dividing a person's life into vacation and not vacation, work and not work, rest and not rest. This attempt to divide the whole space—

AVAlexander Volchek

Watch the video on the channel.

AVAnna Volchek

Into those parts. That really resonates with me, the connection with those other topics.

AVAlexander Volchek

In reality, this really lets you release yourself. Why? Because there's a reason a person wants to find their life's work. There is a reason. To be honest, I haven't had that in my life. I've never searched for my life's work. That's just how it worked out for me. I didn't search for my life's work as a thing in itself. Am I interested in finding something interesting—a business or a job? Of course. I've looked for both a business and a job.

AVAnna Volchek

How do you explain it, then?

AVAlexander Volchek

But I didn't search for it as something incredibly special. As soon as I started searching, I understood that I was looking for something incredibly special that was supposed to lead me to incredibly special results. Essentially, a person hides a set of specific parameters behind the idea of their life's work. Here's the question: where do those parameters come from? They're imposed on the person, including by society. They're imposed by other people. Imposed at university, by parents, by a wife, a husband, brothers and sisters, friends, partners, YouTube videos. Just look at YouTube videos. Look, for goodness' sake, there are so many of them. They talk about this everywhere.

AVAnna Volchek

Look, I do have a question here. Or perhaps we're moving onto another plane, talking about a different state. What should someone do when, at some point in life, they don't understand at all what they want to do, which direction to choose, which niche to choose? They simply don't understand how to fulfill their potential, and it really causes them suffering and difficulties. There are a great many people like that. Many at different ages, many in different countries. It doesn't depend on their standard of living, their wealth, their age, or—

AVAlexander Volchek

What should they do?

AVAnna Volchek

Yes. Or is that a separate topic, and we're…

AVAlexander Volchek

It's related, actually. What should you do in situations where you still don't feel right? There's a second area we need to examine. We've dealt with your life's work, at least with the concept itself and the illusion of being in that space. It's—

AVAnna Volchek

Being in the search.

AVAlexander Volchek

In general. It's simply an illusion, completely absurd, an illusion, right? Look, that's interesting. In a house like that—look at the entrance.

AVAnna Volchek

What do you mean? What about it?

AVAlexander Volchek

That arch there.

AVAnna Volchek

Oh, you mean it's so big, and the house is so small?

AVAlexander Volchek

Yes. Just look at it. Yes. You see, someone made that once. The thing is, Anya, there are things you can't change about what you do professionally. There are things you can't change.

AVAnna Volchek

So you're saying that if a person finds themselves in a state of not knowing what to do about this question, that's—

AVAlexander Volchek

Then you have to keep—

AVAnna Volchek

…the state they're supposed to be in?

AVAlexander Volchek

Do you see what I mean? Everyone wants—often, someone might say, “All right, then tell me: is this simply how things are for me, or should I fight for it?” What are you saying? A question. What kind of question? The person wants to choose some sort of ending for themselves.

Yes, choose an ending for themselves. Magnolia. Choose an ending, choose a resolution. Choose—an ending. They really want to choose an ending for themselves. You tell them, “Well, fight for it.” They keep fighting, then say, “Maybe I should stop fighting after all?”

In fact, you need neither to stop fighting nor to fight; you need to keep living. There isn't a state of struggle here at all. In this subject, there is no state of struggle. I'm by no means saying you shouldn't keep striving, shouldn't look for different opportunities and possibilities, shouldn't set goals, shouldn't try to achieve things, shouldn't dream. That isn't what I'm talking about. I'm saying you need at least to recognize within your own frame of reference that there are things you can't change. Just recognize that. There are things—life unfolds the way it unfolds.