I recently had a moment of clarity that brought about both a sense of relief and a frightening realization. Now, I do not know what each and every one of you is thinking, so all I can really do is speak for myself. But I hope some of this resounds; otherwise I am yelling into a void, which I guess in this case is OK because sometimes we all just need to shout aimlessly for a bit.
The relief I felt came from figuring out what it is I don't want to do in life. We all hear that college is a time when we discover who it is we want to be and what interests us, what excites us. I am so sorry to say to those of you who are not yet in college -- four years are not enough! If you have it all figured out, I wish nothing but luck and success to you and your future. If you do not, I have faith that you eventually will. If you thought you did and had the courage to change your career path entirely, I bow down to you.
Now for the frightening realization:
"If you don't build your own dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs."
I think the reason this hit me so hard is because I always knew time was precious. It is something in this world we have absolutely no control over. The seconds will always tick away. None of us knows the exact number of hours we have left on this earth, but I am so scared of wasting even one. I do not want to sit back and let life happen to me. I want to take control of it. I want to make something of myself. I want to make my parents proud. I want to wake up excited and driven and go to bed satisfied. And that is not to say that I have not already. I am so grateful for the last 21 years of my life. But assuming I live to be 80, I have already lived over a quarter of my life. 25 percent of it is gone and I will spend a fourth of the remaining 75 percent sleeping.
I do not just have one single dream. I do not find satisfaction in the ordinary. I do not believe I was put on this earth to be ordinary. None of us were. So why should any of us live a "safe" life? Yes, safety is comfortable and it pays the bills, but you can never improve or reach new limits if you stay within a comfort zone.
In today's society, yearly earnings play a part in career selection. How many of us have googled "Top Paying Jobs in the United States" at least once? How many of us have felt a sort of cultural pressure from our immigrant parents, who came to the USA with nothing but the dream of giving their child the opportunity at a better life than they had, to go into medicine, for example, because it is a well-paying, respectable profession? There are many noble and lucrative jobs, and if any one of them is your dream, dive into it with full-force. We shouldn't let money or other pressures keep us from doing whatever it is that we love. When we love what we do, we work harder at it; in time, that will pay off. I don't want to wake up every day and have to go to work. I want to want to go to work. Our jobs should be the building blocks of our careers, our dreams.
