Your Calling Isn’t a Destination… It’s a Relationship You Keep Growing Into

**Matthew Gottesman** (0:02)
Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 847, Your Calling Isn't a Destination. It's a relationship you keep growing into.
There's a very specific reason why I'm bringing this up is because often when people ask me about purpose or calling, there's a sort of search for a result, like an end result. Like, oh, well, what's my purpose? What's my calling? And it's a very ongoing process. And I thought we should talk about that because if we try to define something that I believe is really the lifelong, combination of your entire existence, I don't think it can just be categorized into a destination. Like, you're going to arrive somewhere. And I've long said this on the podcast that, you know, I like, I don't believe in this idea of like, retirement or arrival. I believe in living your life purposefully every single day that you're alive until, you know, our time is up, right? And we don't know when that is. Hence, it puts us into a position to live fully every single day, right? And so, that's the evolution of you. That's the discovery of you, the mission of you, the niche is you, right? So your calling isn't a destination. It's a relationship you keep growing into. Now, usually the next question I get from people is, okay, well, then how do I figure that out? Well, the short answer is live. You know, like, that's the short answer. It's, you know, our life is constant discovery. I think often why we do so much for others, one, because the inclination of wanting to naturally just give. We think about that. We want to have impact. We want to give. We want to be purposeful. We want to be useful. We want a fulfilling life. And so what happens is we give, we over give, and I think in doing so, we avoid a lot of internal questions, a lot of internal processes we have to learn, a lot of internal curiosities that we need to understand about ourselves. That same devotion we give others really starts with the devotion we have to give ourselves of who am I, where am I going, what am I doing? I think several times I might have spoken about this again. We're at 800 plus episodes, so there's probably a repeat here. But I remember when I was going through divorce years ago, about 12 years ago, and I brought this up several times about how I was in such a period of deep reflection because I never wanted a divorce, I never believed in a divorce. I know some people say, well, nobody ever does. No, I never really saw that as an option. I just, even, just anyways, the long story short is that I found myself in this weird position of I can't believe I'm here. And so I went to this period of deep reflection, and I had people say, hey, don't you think you're being a little hard on yourself from all this? And I said, here's the deal. I was like, when you're married, when you're in union, you have two people who are responsible for themselves and each other. I was like, when that person is no longer there, it's just you. And so I was like, my responsibility right now is to me is to understanding who am I? Who am I as a man? Who am I in this world? Who am I for my future spouse? Who am I to community? Like, what am I purposefully here to do? Because I, and rightfully so, because I also hadn't spent enough time with myself during those eight years to really get to know some of those parts of me. And so that's why I say, like, when we turn the questions and curiosity inward and we look at ourselves as to, like, the depths of who we are, and we start to take action on some of our curiosities, our passions, our interests, all these things, we start to understand ourselves, our capacity, our skill sets, our strengths, our weaknesses, our, you know, our intricacies, right? All these things that make us who we are. So yeah, you're always growing. And then in doing so, when I first started writing on the internet, I'd always been a writer. I didn't know fully where that was all gonna go because I suppressed that so much that really what I was doing was, well, I was using the medium of the internet because it had been my background in digital and internet and marketing and design and just technology, right? That had been my whole career. And so, when you look back, you can connect the dots during, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna use the internet and I'm gonna write some thoughts around entrepreneurship, relationships, choosing your own path, etc. It was very early days. It was like 2015, 14, 15, 16