Who Will I Become?

This week we read a talk given by Elder Dallin H. Oaks called “The Challenge to Become.”  In this talk, Elder Oaks discusses the difference between evaluating ourselves based on actions versus evaluating ourselves based on our desires and who we have become.  This is a topic that I think of and struggle with often.  I know that I am a good person who does good things and am doing my best to follow the Savior and become like Him; however, I sometimes encounter people who are closer to becoming like Him than I am and realize how far I still must go.  It is important that we not only do good things, but we also desire to do good things.  I struggle to become more than I am every day; I call it growing pains.  When we go through trials in life, we need to do more than just endure them; we must learn from them and become better people.  It is through our trials and our experiences that we become the person that our Heavenly Father knows we can become.

This principle can be applied in our professional lives as well.  We should have dreams of what we wish to achieve in our professional lives.  Like our spiritual selves, we cannot achieve these goals by staying the same person all the time.  We must learn and grow constantly.  As we do, we become better, more valuable workers who can achieve greater things than we could before.  To reach for our dreams we need to seek out the skills and people we will need to help us get there.  We must be constantly rowing and changing to achieve our big dreams.

I was also interested in learning bout Google’s “20% time” from Marissa Mayer’s video “License to Pursue Dreams.”  It was fascinating to me that if you invest just 20% of you time into your dreams, you can create great things.  What I found so fascinating about this is the idea that you could potentially achieve your dreams if you give it just 20% of you time.  You can work on a goal while still having time for a career and your family.  Dreams and goals do not need to be held back by the need to sustain employment if you can invest 20% of your time.  That is less than 34 hours a week or just under 5 hours a day each day.  Right now, I am spending that time working on my dream of getting a bachelor’s degree.  I am interested to see what goals I will be able to achieve after that.