I made a huge mistake several years ago.
I quit my comfortable, high-paying, work-at-home job so I could follow my passions. The problem was, I wasn’t making money from any of my passions yet.
Now, I did have some plans in place, so it wasn’t a purely foolish decision. I had enough money set aside to last a few years, and I was actively investing it. I had plans to move to a lower-cost area.
But the universe follows Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” I had to take half of the money off the table to settle important family matters. And it turned out that my family was not ready to move. And as you can probably predict, the income from my passion work came in as a trickle that was insignificant compared to my former job income.
So in January 2020, I went back to my old boring job of looking through patent filings and writing up reports in legalese. As it turns out, sometimes the universe also works in your favor. A friend of mine once told me that I have a knack for perfectly timing my major life events. I went back to my job just a couple of months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we were all sent home to do the work remotely. The damage caused by my huge mistake was largely erased, and I could move forward on a wiser path.
I learned a big lesson. You don’t need to upend your life to pursue your passions. If you are already on a path in life that’s working, just keep going. But staying on the big, boring path in life doesn’t mean that life has to be boring. You can always explore the areas along the fringes of your path. With enough exploration, you may discover another, better path.
I feel like my pursuit of passion several years ago led me off of the main path along a small side path. The side path was not a dead end, but it led somewhere that I was not expecting. I could see something beautiful in a distance, but I could not be sure that the side path I was on would take me there. So now I’ve gotten back onto the main path, but I know the general direction of the beautiful thing I saw in a distance. From here I will stick to the main path, but keep an eye out for the other paths that might lead in the direction of the “beautiful thing.” You might think I’ve taken a step backward in life. However, there’s one key difference: now I know my destination.
Leave a Reply