In your search for quality, you must create far more material than you can use, then destroy it.*
(Robert McKee)

He [Danny Boyle] restored to us the people we were before we made career choices – to when we were just wondering.**
(Frank Cottrell Boyce)

When it comes to who we are and what we can do, there’s far more to the basics than we imagine.

The first part of the work I engage in with others involves divergence, being open to and noticing of the many things in their lives that can lead to adjacent possibilities: values, talents, dreams, energising and enervating environments.

Divergence has to be followed by emergence, when the possibilities are honed down through acknowledging what the heart longs for, which is the convergence:

We will always need to be humble enough to accept that our heart knows why we’re here.^

Only then can we express the fullness of our own gifts,’^^ shaping our lives into a ‘gem-quality story.’*

Maybe the career-path kicked in too quickly and the heart isn’t in it, maybe we’re still trying to figure it all out. A good place to return to is the basics and to take a deeper look.

(*From Robert McKee’s blog: Why Writers destroy Their Work.)
(**Frank Cottrell Boyce, quoted in Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester’s Dancing at the Edge.)
(^From Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)
(^^From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)