At a young age, we are all asked a very crucial question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. Most children answer this by resorting to the things that they have heard about, such as being president or being a school teacher, but others will answer with the names of occupations that involve doing something they love. I was the latter of the two, always telling my parents and teachers that I was going to be a veterinarian given my love for animals. However, what most young kids don’t realize is that as time goes on, things can change. As kids grow up, they begin to realize that becoming president is a lot more work than they thought, or that being a teacher involves years of schooling that they’re just not sure they want to commit to. And then, there’s the classic, “I wanted to be a doctor until I entered into higher level science courses and realized I just didn’t have a talent for that way of thinking”, this- as I’m sure you could have guessed- is what happened to me.
During my senior year of high school took a course entitled, “Senior Writer’s Seminar”, pretty self-explanatory for what we did in that class. I had always enjoyed writing, and had been writing my own musical compositions for about four years at this point, but never imagined that I would be a writer once I graduated college. Still, this course made me do a complete 180 and consider the possibility of being a writer someday- and that’s when stress about my future really began to settle in. As I began to love writing more, I decided that all I really wanted to do in my life was to be a writer- to make people feel things and inspire them through the written word. It seemed like a reasonable goal. After all, don’t your parents always tell you to aim for an occupation that you love so that you will be motivated to do it the rest of your life? Yes, they do, but what they don’t tell you at the ripe age of 10-years-old is that you’ll have more to worry about than your happiness. You know where I’m going with this- money.
We’ve all heard someone say to us at one time or another that if you aren’t doing something you truly love, you won’t be happy in your life. When we are younger, we take this to heart and believe these words to be 100% valid. Yet, once we enter into college we start to question whether or not our happiness really will be the most important thing, or if being financially well-off may become more prominent in our lives. I always anticipated that I would never be the person to be so consumed by the concept of money after college, but I was wrong. As a creative writing major, I have learned from several professors that, unless you’re J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, the chances of you becoming extremely successful in the field of writing is quite slim. Nevertheless, conversations with these professors encouraged me to ask one crucial question: should the likelihood for you to live a simple life with little possessions stop you from going after your dream job?
It is a question that I have struggled to answer, and one that I’m sure many of you reading this article have thought about several times in your life. For those of us who are the “go-getters” of the world, we are constantly trying to push ourselves to go after our dreams no matter how far-fetched are difficult they may be, but what does that mean for us when our dreams equate to little income? Should we change our mindset and work to find a new dream? Or should we simply force ourselves to accept the fact that we may not be as wealthy as the second grade version of us once dreamed we would be?
The answer is simple, and I’m sure you are dreading it. Keep your dream. If you are doing something you love, and it is important that you keep it in your life and continue to push yourself in that field moving forward, why give up on it? Sure, you want to be wealthy and make sure you can provide for your future family, but who’s to say that you won’t win a Grammy as a struggling artist in Nashville someday? Or that Steven Spielberg won’t contact you asking to use your idea for his next major motion picture? Is it likely these things will happen? Maybe not. But it is possible, so don’t convince yourself to find something else that you love when deep down, you know exactly what you want to be doing with your life.
You may end up being a billionaire and achieving something in the field that you work in that no one has ever done before. After all, “anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.” –J.K. Rowling.
