What do you do when your dream dies? When it’s obvious that all you’ve worked towards isn’t going to come to pass. One day you realize, you’re just not good at what you’ve been pursuing. You’re not built for it. It’s not a natural strength. And now, you find yourself depressed and asking, “What’s next?”
I’ve been reading and enjoying David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.
In it, the author explores how the City of Light attracted hundreds of Americans between 1830 and 1900 — including household names like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse, and Mark Twain – and in turn helped shape American art, medicine, writing, science and politics. Set in Paris, it is a brilliant perspective on American history.
Morse Code
One of the characters I’ve appreciated following is Samuel Morse. I was unaware that Morse had his heart set on becoming a world-class master painter since his early days in college. And, even though he had a measure of success painting portraits, he failed in his ultimate pursuit.
He had travelled to Paris to learn from the masters and spent everyday for two years working on The Gallery of the Louvre. It depicts many of the Louvre’s great paintings on a 6×9 foot canvas. Morse sold it for far less than he was hoping.
Upon returning home to the United States, Morse gave up painting entirely and with it, his dreams of accomplishment and recognition as an artist. Morse told his friend, Nathaniel Willis, that he was so tired of his life that had he “divine authorization, he would end it.”
“Painting has been a smiling mistress to many but she has been cruel to me. I did not abandon her. She abandoned me.”
Samuel Morse
But Morse’s greatest contribution was yet to come. He refocused his efforts on something else he had experimented with while in Paris… the magnetic telegraph, precursor to the telephone.
Had he not stopped painting when he did, no electrically magnetic telegraph could have happened when it did. At least not by his hand. Within a few decades, messages were being sent trans-oceanic all around the globe. Today, we take global communication for granted but it was nothing short of a miracle at the time.
Stop being a copy and realign your focus with your strengths
Your failures and setbacks aren’t fatal or final. And, maybe you do just need to hang in there, not give up, and see that thing through.
Or maybe, you need to realign your focus with your true strengths. Maybe you’ve been trying to be something you’re not. You’ve been wishing you could be that “more successful” someone else. That’s why you’re frustrated.
Maybe you need to stop sitting around merely emulating the “greats” and making copies of their masterpieces. Maybe just maybe, your greatest contribution is yet to come. But that won’t happen until you start being you.