In my last post I mentioned that I switched my career path to financial planning. I want to clarify a few things that might have been left unclear.
Number one, I want everyone to pursue their passion. I do not want anyone to give up on their dreams due to practical concerns. Sure, sometimes you realize that your ambition is completely unreasonable, but if you have a deep passion for something, you can always find a way to continue to pursue it in one way or another. If you wanted to become a world renowned musician, maybe that will never happen, but you can continue to compose and perform music. There’s almost always a way to engage in what you love.
Maybe you’ll never be president, but you almost certainly can make a difference politically at some level. It can be very good to humble our ambitions and focus our energy on the work that’s at the core of our passion. Instead of wasting all our energy struggling to gain a certain title, we can invest that energy in engaging directly with our passion.
I by no means have given up on my objectives in life. What I gave up on was the pathway I was pursuing to achieve my objectives. With the stability of my new career, I plan to devote much of my free time to the causes I care about. With the increased income, I plan to attend more conferences and retreats in order to make more connections and be part of the conversation on the issues I care most about.
It’s hard to build without work stability. But once you no longer have to worry about applying to jobs, you can mold your non-working time into meaningful projects. And you can commit to those projects long-term because you have a predictable schedule and income to plan around. Strangely, sometimes structure can be very liberating to one’s life.