 Throughout my life, I've met a number of people who dreamed of becoming a Buddhist monk or a hermit in the mountains. Their desires would also remind me of others, who desired to quit their jobs, leave their families, and go on a spiritual pursuit to India or Nepal. I would even question whether these dreams are not similar to those who have other, far beyond them, ideas such as becoming a famous YouTuber, best fighter in the world, or living out some other popular idea of success and fulfillment. Yet what if these dreams are more akin to fantasy and that living them out could actually cause more harm than good? As a very good example of this, Cal Newpert in his book So Goodly Can't Ignore You tells a real story of Thomas, an educated man who had the dream of becoming a Zen monk. Based on the story, Thomas was always wondering about the meaning of life and through the studies of religion and theology came to a conclusion that practicing Zen Buddhism would be the key to living a meaningful life. While he was saving up money to make his dream come true, he always kept thinking how all the other work he did paled in comparison. He eventually learned about the Zen Mountain Monastery located in the United States, which was a place of very intense Buddhism practice. After completing an application process that lasted nine months, he was eventually approved to live and practice in the monastery. Thomas describes his experience arriving there as, it was like being really hungry and you know that you're going to get this amazing meal. That is what this represented for me. The beginning went well enough as he was getting used to an intense daily routine that started as early as 4.30 in the morning. Among daily lectures and household duties, his practice also included koans. A traditional word puzzle often presented as a story or a question meant to defy logical answers and therefore forced you to access a more intuitive understanding of reality. As Thomas was working on his given koan, he managed to eventually crack it by having an experience of unity familiar to many who practice meditation. He was happy to present the right answer to his master about the koan and for a while was satisfied with the experience. But after some time passed, that same realization that he received for his practice eventually led him to a very different conclusion. Armed with the insight discovered through this practice, he had begun to understand the ones obscure lectures given most days by senior monks. Years later he said, as I walked that trail, I realized that these lectures were all talking about the same thing as the Mu Koan. In other words, this was it. This was what life as a Zen monk offered, increasingly sophisticated musings on this one core insight. He had reached the zenith of his passion. He could now properly call himself a Zen practitioner. And yet, he was not experiencing the undiluted peace and happiness that had polluted his daydreams. Thomas continued, the reality was nothing had changed. I was exactly the same person with the same worries and anxieties. It was late on a Sunday afternoon when I came to this realization and I just started crying. As the passage in Cal Newport's book describes it, Thomas has followed his passion to the Zen mountain monastery believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as he experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naive. Fulfilling his dream to become a full-time Zen practitioner did not magically make his life wonderful. As Thomas discovered, the path to happiness, at least as it concerns what you do for a living, is more complicated than simply answering the classic question, what should I do with my life? The story is almost a scary one, especially for those of us who have dreams of one day fulfilling a secret grand idea and seeing the notion of it as our salvation, believing that once I will do it, then I will be happy. Hearing Thomas' story, while many people could believe that would not be my case, he failed where I would succeed in finding true happiness. In truth, it is important to admit that there is no guarantee that our experience wouldn't be near identical to Thomas' yet what matters in this story even more is what happened to Thomas afterwards. When Cal Newport met Thomas almost 10 years later, he learned that once he left the monastery, Thomas went back to his banking job, one that he left two years ago just before moving to become a Zen monk. As Cal describes in his book, this time however, Thomas approached his working life with a new awareness. His experience at the monastery had freed him from the escapist thoughts of fantasy jobs that had once dominated his mind. He was able instead to focus on the tasks he was given and on accomplishing them well. He was free from the constant, draining comparison he used to make between his current work and some magical future occupation waiting to be discovered. This focus and commitment to his job was recognized by Thomas' management and over the course of two years he received free promotions which led him to a senior position in the company. While his work is challenging, Thomas admitted that he likes the challenge and as Cal points out he also experienced a sense of respect, impact and autonomy which created a feeling of satisfaction at his workplace. This concept is based on a study-based theoretical framework known as self-determination theory or SDT which argues that in order to feel happy at the job you do, there has to be three different factors, namely autonomy, the feeling that you have control over your day and that your actions are important, competence, the feeling that you are good at what you do and relatedness, the feeling of connection to other people and if one of the factors is missing in your job that may very well lead you to a sense of lack of satisfaction. As Cal continues to explain, Thomas acquired these traits not by matching his work to his passion but instead by doing his work well and then by creating desired conditions based on the value he created. To finish off Thomas' story Cal writes, managing computer systems might not generate the daily bliss that defined Thomas' old daydreams but as he now recognized nothing would. A fulfilling work life is a more subtle experience than his old fantasies had allowed. Thomas agreed that a good way of describing his transformation is that he came to realize a simple truth, working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness, he needed instead a better approach to the work available to him. Once again, this story proves to be mind bending especially to those of us who believe that the only way to be happy is to live your dream. And as an individual who has personally fulfilled many of his dreams I can tell you, any work, even your dream work, will still be work. It will still have its ups and downs, it will still have its challenges and it will most likely fail to be your absolute salvation to complete life happiness. If we will continue to believe that happiness will only come when we will fulfill our dreams, how much happiness will we truly experience until we will one day make it happen. And even more so, what if our dream turns out to be a fantasy, one which is far from realistic and by getting there we will only end up feeling worse than before. I do not mean to say that having dreams is an entirely bad idea, a dream may motivate us to work harder and to seek new solutions. But in general I would side to argue together with Cal Newport if we should really invest all of our faith into a single, often unreliable idea. And instead if it would not be wiser to start to appreciate more what we have already, to focus on doing it even better, to work to reach autonomy, competence, and related as gradually where we are. And at best to slowly work towards our greater dream but not as a salvation, and even better not as a dream or fantasy, but as a project that we would like to try and create instead of an all-in endeavor which has no guarantees and reliability. Do you agree with the message in this video? Let me know in the comments. And if you would like to see more videos like this one, subscribe to The Journey. This was Rokas, and I wish you to work smart, hard, and purposefully.