The pain of stepping forward

And so I turned down yet another direct sales job again. There's too many, I tell you, people clamouring to train you to sell their products, with promises that you'd be given the best training, in the best corporate environment. Some with a lot of genuity in their tone, others with a slight sharp edge even years of training to be a suave salesman cannot remove. AND THEY DON'T ACTUALLY TELL YOU IN THE AD THAT ITS DIRECT SALES.

The person could have been a little lighter on his I-don't-think-you're-really-cut-out-for-this-at-all tone though. I mean, I might be able to totally describe to you in excrutiatingly clear detail what I understand your company does if not for my hesitancy in applying for the job and your painfully vague website.

Even my mom tells me I'm not cut of for sales. You'd need to have patience, a lot of it (and she says this extremely pointedly) apart from the polished speech right from the beginning. The ability to understand the customer's concerns, at every turn of speech, and turn around the sales in your favour.

The truth is I'd always admired businesspeople. The tenacity, positiveness, confidence that they exude, their guts and charisma.

And I know I'd wanna learn more about business. I've been telling myself that for so long.

And I know I'd wanna set up my own social enterprise someday giving work to people who badly need it. And train them if need be.

Idealistic, I know.

And another truth about me is that I do love getting myself into new situations. Drama, debates and whodahelloads else in JC, ODAC and dikir in secondary school, looking back I've always been very much into personal development and growth. I mean, I may have totally screwed up my first emceeing for HEARTSOUT and second for drama (which they told me like 30 mins before the show and wrote out my speech right then!) but I learnt and moved on. I may have sucked on the job, I hated admin work, gritted my teeth through bitchy people I've met, but in all it was all for good. I mean, we were in SCHOOL. Nobody cares if you screwed up your part on the presentation, flunked a really important paper, embarrassed myself in front of the class for saying something totally off the board or messed up bad in trying to make yet another out of point point.

My point is, I hate shoeboxing myself in. I've a whole lot of experience in a varied lot of things, but I don't exactly need to parade it in my resume or prove it to my friends or every single person I meet.

I hate being told what to be, what to do, how to do things just because I have a life sciences degree. I want to be able to do a million and one things and be good at them.

I wanna be able to live by my own ideals. And at the end of my life, know that I've lived a meaningful one and would have made the people around me better, and my parents proud.

I'd also want to know what I'm really really good at.

And about sales, maybe I'm just a wuss for not being able to have the guts to sell.
But maybe too I actually care about whether my target client actually needs the product as badly I would have to make it seem.
And maybe I'd like to actually believe that the product would make their lives really that much better for what I'd sell it for.

And maybe I'd like to actually devote my time learning so that I could actually make a product that would make lives really that much better.

Am I being too idealistic, or is this actually called living out my dreams?