Freddie Roach hated boxing. He’d enrolled in training since he was young, and got into hundreds of fights outside the gym as well. While he created momentum as a professional boxer, he suffered a string of defeats and was eventually diagnosed with symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
For a boxer who never quit a fight—in fact, Freddie had developed a reputation for taking hits—perhaps the most difficult decision he had to make was to walk away, with little to show for it.
Life was asking something else of Freddie.
To make ends meet, Freddie took on telemarketing and busboy jobs. He felt depressed at how his career ended, and started drinking heavily—“I was trying to escape life,” he says—he wasn’t sure what would happen next.
One day, his friend asked Freddie to watch him spar in preparation for a championship bout. Nobody was helping his friend, so Freddie brought him water and gave him advice. He showed up the next day to help his friend again, and eventually became a regular at the gym. He wasn’t being paid for his boxing coaching, so he kept his jobs, but he felt alive. He showed up on time and stayed late. This set Freddie on the path to become one of the best boxing trainers in the world, and earning his spot in multiple Halls of Fame.
One road to mastery starts with discovering your Life’s Task. While it resembles a vocation, it will not be a straight line. In Mastery, Robert Greene writes, “Remember: your Life’s Task is a living, breathing organism. The moment you rigidly follow a plan set in your youth, you lock yourself into a position, and the times will ruthlessly pass you by.”
In Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman points out two signposts for you discovering your Life’s Task:
The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’ as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security….
The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have fifty pounds in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of pounds’ worth of movie-making equipment (although it might involve doing something to raise the cash).
This helps distinguish the idea of a life task from certain popular notions of ‘destiny’ or ‘calling,’ which can leave people feeling as though there’s something they’re meant to be doing with their lives, but that their life circumstances make it impossible. That can’t be the case with a life task, which emerges, by definition, from whatever your life circumstances are. It’s what’s being asked of you, with your particular skills, resources and personality traits, in the place where you actually find yourself.
For me, the takeaway is in that final paragraph I excerpted. Your life is your life. Your life’s task will be, by definition, a byproduct of your life. While patterning your career after someone else’s can be helpful, following it too closely will strip your path of your own unique strengths and personality.
Through your friends, your family, and your finitude, life is asking you something. Will you listen?