You Get More Than 1 Chance To Decide What You Want To Do.
'What's next' is my favourite question.
Self-employment Week: 67
“What if I become a therapist?” I asked my partner in the midst of my current read, ‘Maybe you should talk to someone’ wherein the author too had decided to pursue a career as a counseling psychologist well into her late thirties.
“Yeah, that’ll be nice!”, he says. Like he always does.
See, I let my surroundings heavily inspire & influence me.
I sit at a bar & look up bartending courses cause I’m suddenly inspired to be a bartender.
I visit a boutique to get my wedding clothes stitched & consider being a designer.
I work with people to create their online courses & I find myself enrolled in a Master’s program for adult education because I now want to change education policy at a central level.
I genuinely do mean it when I consider each of these things.
And if they ever make sense for the kind of life I want to live, I would leap to pursue it in an instant.
Because life is long.
I’m 26, I’m married, I feel content with the amount of money I make.
If I thought that we could only do or be 1 thing in this life, I would not survive the next 60 years.
It can be overwhelming at 18 and even at 28 to have to decide what work you are going to do for the rest of your life.
But that’s only if you EVER have to make such a decision.
And I say you don’t.
You only need to decide what work you’re going to do for the next few years.
I know there is a lot of merit to being in 1 field for a very long time, in having a depth of knowledge and more context with every passing year.
But I don’t know if either you or me are going to do work that saves the world.
The best we’re going to do is get someone to think about something differently or teach them a new skill.
So I decided to sacrifice competence for novelty.
And it feels like an extremely selfish act. To not care about the natural progression of the work you’re doing.
Not caring about managing & training the ones who will come after you.
Not wanting to grow with your client’s business & help them through those different stages.
Not caring about creating the next course in your product suit that helps your students on their journey.
Not caring about your readers & what they want to hear from you.
Not caring about the stability & certainity for the people in your life.
We’ve seen that creators switch up their content every few years. Because having done that for more than a decade, they realise it’s not the right thing for neither them nor their audience to continue exploring the same topic for a very long time.
So why then do we surrender to work in the same field for the entirety of our life?
Why do we have doctors, lawyers, consultants, writers & math professors.
As opposed to a doctor who used to write screenplay. A writer who used to design houses. A lawyer who used to be a chef.
No way does staying in the same field for 60 years sound easy, but changing it every few years is different kind of hard.
It requires a level of ‘fuck it’ mentality.
It requires you to have a beginner mindset.
It requires you to have an immense amount of trust in yourself.
It requires you to be humble. There is no prestige in being a student at 30 when you could have been a VP.
It requires temporary sacrifice.
It requires you to have saved money.
I don’t know if the world is better off with people changing what they do every few years. And I don’t know if I care.
Because I believe for some of us, we will be better off.
But starting new things, also requires to quit what you’re currently doing.
So, here’s a little something I wrote on quitting.