Watching yourself do everything you ever disapproved of

Being colorblind doesn’t have a huge impact on my daily life.

My reds and greens may be a bit off kilter, but other than the occasional fashion faux pas, and one or two traffic light homicides, it’s not something worth obsessing over.

In fact, my inability to discern certain colors has led me to ask an important question.

What if everything in my life didn’t have to match perfectly?

It would be cleaner, but then again, consistency for consistency’s sake isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Think about your last job. Odds are, it wasn’t perfect, right? And you couldn’t bring one hundred percent of your authentic self, right?

Big deal. That’s just a little colorblindness. The real question you have to ask yourself is:

Could you do the work without wanting to kill yourself every day? Could you deal with the people even if every last one of your interests and values were in line?

Awesome. Then that’s good enough.

As noble as it feels to congratulate ourselves on having high standards and not compromising, the reality is, the colors are rarely if ever perfectly congruent.

It’s like my mentor used to say: You don’t have to love the thing, only its consequences.

Because if the work enables you to live a fulfilling life, then does it really matter if the alignment is imperfect?

Interestingly enough, there is generally no treatment to cure color deficiencies. Although optometrists report that a contact lens on one eye can increase the ability to differentiate between colors, nothing can make you truly see the deficient color. It’s just something that you learn to live with.

Jobs are kind of the same thing. You operate with as much honesty and integrity as you can afford. You do what you have to do to make it okay with yourself. And you put yourself in unison with the imperfection of the world.

Trusting that the fabric of the universe is not going to unravel just because you spend eight hours a day as someone with a slightly compromised constitution.

It’s just a job. Your identity is not dependent on merely one of your choices in life. And nobody is going to tell you that you’re a huge asshole for trying to make a living.

This is what maturity affords us. The chance to secretly shake our heads at the sweet naiveté of our youth.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
When was the last time you did something you swore you’d never do?