One thing I hate in life is when people say “I’m not sure you should do that”, or “that looks difficult/complicated/impossible… if I were you I wouldn’t”. Most of us never question their routine or challenge life. You study, you graduate, you work for 40 years, so you can pay your debt and rack up more debt and hopefully retire in a small paid for house, and start enjoying life in your 60s.
I DON’T WANT THAT!!
I don’t want to wake up every morning at the same time, go to the same office, do the same work over and over, and come back home tired and frustrated, with the sole purpose to maybe at the end of the year, get to enjoy a month off.
I want to wake up with the sun, or at midday if I feel like it, see the world, meet people, do something significant with my time, my money and my life.
So WHY are people trying to stop me?
For most of my life, I have enjoyed challenging authority. Be it teachers, parents, bosses… I had to have my say. I didn’t want to study German just because it was a more exclusive class to graduate in. I’d rather study Spanish and be able to speak with most of Latin America.
I wanted to live on my own since I was 17, even if that meant having little money and comfort to start. It only pushed my barriers further and forced me to work hard for everything I wanted.
And finally, I wouldn’t stand a boss for my whole adult life, so when I resigned after 2 years at my last job, having saved enough money to start my independent life, my boss looked puzzled, as if I was crazy.
You see, I don’t really care. My life is about me. It’s about who I want to be and not who people want me to be.
Sure, my parents would love to have a perfect student, calm and well behaved. But I guess in the end they were proud of me, for living on my own, going were I really wanted and turning out quite fine.
Yet they were reluctant to see me take the leap. My boss pictured me working until retirement at his company. People are used to a comfortable routine. They expect that you will never change. Some pride themselves in not changing. To me, this is unbearable.
It takes guts to go to your parents and say “I don’t like the plans you have for me, I want to do something else with my life”. In high school, it was harder. When I decided to go travel the world after graduation it was easier to announce since I had been paying my way through college and hadn’t cost them a dime for the past 5 years. But imagine that you have to announce to your parents that you are gay, or that you want to become a priest, or travel the world, anything out of the ordinary. You have to be truly passionate about whatever you want to become. Or people won’t believe in you, making it hard to believe in yourself, and they will take pleasure in seeing you fail.
And if you succeed, those people will be the first to say “I knew it, I never doubted you”. Is that so? I don’t really care what people think, I never have. Some see me as a crazy girl traveling the world, wonder where I get my money from and probably imagine that my poor mum writes me a check every month.
Other are jealous, and say nothing, looking at me with envy when they go to their boring job every day. And some are inspired by what I’m doing and trying to become who they really are.
One of my friends had had dead end jobs for years. He was in debt and depressed. He never considered that his life could be any different from what it was: wake up, go to work, be bored, and broke on the 10th of the month, with debt eating most of your income. We talked about a change in his career. He was worried. But there is a fabulous incentive in France that enables you to go back to school, paid for by your company, and keep a part of your income while you do. This friend studied interior design, loved it, resigned from his 9 to 5 job and off he was to conquer the world. It took him a couple of years of hard work and dedication to reach his goal, but now he is able to make a small living out of it, his business is growing and he has never been happier.
Where I am going is that you don’t need to be who people want you to be. If you don’t provoke your luck, you will never go anywhere. And as scary as it may seem, if you do what you truly love, you will do it better than your actual job, and money will come easier. You will also be happier and people around you will see who you truly are and love you more for it.