On Monday, I asked you what your ideal work was. Today, I’ll tell you what mine is.
I’m fortunate to have found work that I loved not once, but twice. I consider myself very fortunate because many never find the work that was meant for them.
An Outsider Goes Inside
I’ve always hated to be inside. Climbing this beats a day at the office any and all times:
And, it’s way better to be here on a Thursday afternoon than in a cube:
When I was a kid, I’d spend the summers tearing around the neighborhood on my freedom machine, the bicycle. When I first started thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up, my thought was this:
There’s no way I’m working at a job where I’m confined to an office.
When I got a little older, I wasn’t sure how reasonable it was to work outside, so I gave up on that. Like 98% of boys, my next thought was this:
Planes! I want to be a pilot! How do I get to fly an F-16?
Later, someone told me that you needed perfect eyesight to fly, so I dismissed my F-16 dreams.
In high school, I still had no clue about what I wanted to do. The only thing I did know was that I liked science, so I took biology, chemistry and physics classes.
By the time I got to college, I still had no idea what I wanted to be. I liked writing, but the job prospects for journalism weren’t good. I knew that I’d have to take out loans to go to university and I wasn’t willing to take on loads of debt for an uncertain career. What to do? I still liked science, so I studied biology at Northern Illinois University.
Four years later, I graduated and still had no idea what I wanted to do, so I enrolled in a Doctor of Pharmacy program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
About halfway through my first year at pharmacy school, I realized that working as a pharmacist would not make me happy. I was telling my roommate about my dilemma and he said something like this:
Have you considered programming? If you like solving puzzles, you should give it a try. DePaul has a programming certificate program that’s only 30 weeks long and you can get a good job once you complete it.
I thought about this for about 30 minutes and decided to finish up my year of pharmacy school and then enroll in the computer program. At the time, for whatever reason, this didn’t make me nervous at all even though my family thought I was crazy. Looking back, it was a bit reckless. I was giving up a high paying pharmacy career for an unknown, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions that I ever made. I loved love coding. Figuring out how to make computers implement the requirements of business people is great fun. And looking back, perhaps the most amazing part was this:
The kid who swore he could never find happiness working inside now found happiness sitting in a cube for 9 hours per day.
I think that there’s an important lesson in here and it’s this:
You’re never really sure what will make you happy.
And now, I’ve left my formal career, but I still write code. My next goal is to either learn Python or Swift.
My Other Unexpected Career
I started this silly blog on a whim back on January first of 2013. I was having lots of stress at my job, so I googled something like:
How do I retire early?
I discovered Mr. Money Mustache and the following happened in the course of less than an hour:
- Disbelief: This guy claims he retired in his early 30s? Bullshit. This is fake and/or this dude is trying to sell something. Fortunately, I kept reading.
- Acceptance: Hmmm, this mustache guy lives on $24,000 per year. According to the 4% Rule, he only needed $600,000 to quit his job. Anonymous people on the internet may lie, but numbers don’t. I don’t want to live on $24,000/year, but this early retirement thing is doable. Maybe this mustache guy isn’t full of shit after all…
- Onward! I’m turning violently on to Early Retirement Avenue and pushing the pedal to the metal. And, I’m going to start a blog to document my journey!
I never thought anyone would read anything I had to say. However, people did start reading it.
And, writing has been even more fun than I expected. While the blog makes some money now, for the first 3 years, readers were scant and it made about $100. I didn’t care because I was doing it for the joy of writing. And it still continues to bring me happiness.
My original plan was to end the blog at 1500 days. I had even written my final post. As Day 1500 got closer, the idea of killing the blog was also killing me. I was having too much fun, so I decided to press on. And in a strange twist, something went wrong with either the blogging platform or the website’s host and the draft of my last post disappeared. If there was ever a sign to continue, that was it.
But the time will come when I’ll get bored of writing or some other project will come along that is more interesting and I’ll move on.
Open Book (What Career?)
I think life is much more fun when the future is uncertain. Think about it this way; which is better:
For the next two decades, I will:
Work at a job (40,000 hours) and then retire. Hopefully, I’m still in reasonable health.
Or:
?????
An uncharted path is much more interesting. I’ll go where opportunities and passions take me.
Someone asked me recently what my career was. I had to think a bit. This is the definition of career:
An occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress.
I almost made it 20 years in computers. That was a long time, but maybe not long enough to call it a career.
I’ll figure out a career when I grow up which will most likely be never.
Great stuff, nice Quandary pic! I think “what we wanna do in life” will change for most, and probably many times. That’s why being FI is so awesome – you can follow those muses over time! You still love blogging and that’s awesome, but if/when you find out you wanna do woodworking or something you’ll just be able to go buy a table saw and chase it. And if it never makes any money then who cares – you don’t need the money.
It’s ultimate freedom!
Ultimate freedom, yeah! Living on your own terms where money doesn’t have to dictate your decisions is pretty great!
I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve noticed that most people I talk with also have no clue. Having just pulled the cord on reFIREment I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my time and what will make me happy. So far, things have been great, and I’ve been very busy catching up on all those things I couldn’t do when working, but I worry, what will happen in a few months. Well, I guess I’ll find out. As you brilliantly said, “I think life is much more fun when the future is uncertain.”
Freedom 40 Plan recently posted…When Your Net Worth Isn’t Your Net Worth
If you’re anything like more FIRE Folks, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. I made a list of stuff I wanted to do when I quit. 16 months later, I’ve gotten around to less than 5% of it. Meanwhile, the list has more than doubled in length. I can’t make this stuff up.
Well said! Also just saw this and thought of you:
https://www.thrillist.com/drink/nation/small-beer-cities-asheville-bend-santa-fe-burlington-and-more
Longmont represent!
Longmont is pretty awesome! I can walk to at least half of them in less than 20 minutes. #trouble! 🙂
There’s an old Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comic about starting a new life every 7 years. The idea is that you have 11 lives, and you can do something different in each one. It can be tough to let go of who we were in our last life, but it’s silly for us to define ourselves by what we did in our past life.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-09-02
My favorite line is, “2 more years till i die…I can’t wait to see what I do next!”
Wow, that comic is awesome. And so damn relevant. I thought I’d do the same thing for 40 years. Being fluid and exploring unexpected and unplanned territory is so much more fun!
I liked being a hardware engineer when I was young, but it got old pretty quickly. I guess it’s not really my passion. I haven’t touch engineering since I retired from my career 6 years ago and I’m perfectly fine with that. That phase of life is over with. Now, I enjoy blogging, but I’m not going to do it forever. I’ll move on to something else at some point. We are all stumbling along trying to do the best we can in this game of life.
I suppose some people must have it all together.
“I suppose some people must have it all together.”
Or the opposite.
i think i did it the opposite way with the timeline. i spend a lot of years early on doing whatever struck me and then found financial discipline around age 35. it worked out well and this writing thing is a lot of fun. i like that come of the community enjoys my alternate way of seeing things even within the niche. even if it’s just the same dozen people reading regularly and never making any money from it that’s ok. it’s been fun learning the digital world or learning anything new for that matter.
freddy smidlap recently posted…Financial Independence From Working in a Factory?
However you get there, as long as you enjoyed the journey, that’s what it’s about.
Well said. I think constant learning is part of the fun!!
I’ve made several changes in my life and I’m looking forward to more.
Speaking of which we need to work on a project together.
Yep, we’ll do a project. I’m gonna pick up Python or Swift later this year.
Can anyone else get in on the fun? I just recently finished a Udemy course on Python but haven’t done any real world coding with Python yet.
Which 14’r was that? My wife and I did Mt. Yale earlier this year, it was pretty tough going I thought. We drove straight in from 200 foot elevation Arkansas to Colorado and had zero altitude adjustment time before the hike. Not too smart but we did complete it successfully. I think Long’s peak is on next years list!
That 14er was Mt. Quandary. It’s an easy one.
Y’all are badasses for going from 200′ to 14.000′!
Long’s Peak isn’t an easy one, but if you’re serious and want a partner, please hit me up!
DeKalb overload! One of the foremost seed engineers/biochemists lived down the street from us. His estate sale had TONS of DeKalb memorabilia and I may have a belt buckle, necktie, and notepads because of it. If you remember it from your time at NIU, Corn Fest is next weekend!
The uncharted path is awesome. We travelled to 22 states in 6 months pulling our 5th wheel RV. Our only plan was to skip winter and move to a new place every few days. There were some places on the map we wanted to visit, but the route there was completely blank. It might have been the best 6 months of my life. We’ve been “home” (in DeKalb) for almost 3 months and have been missing that open-ended adventure that only a life on the road can give.
I DO remember Corn Fest! After eating 6 ears of corn or so, the next day’s BMs were always interesting!!! #TMI!
Your trip sounds awesome. I hope to do the same once our children leave the home.
Nicely said 15hundo. The funny thing is, when we ‘slow down’ for early retirement, we feel more comfortable taking risks. Our brains have more downtime to rejuvenate. Our attention is shifted from defending against information overload to proactively making adjustments that improve our wellbeing. We might do less, but we create more. Sounds like you are well entrenched in that create more phase – hoping I get (and stay) there too!
“The funny thing is, when we ‘slow down’ for early retirement, we feel more comfortable taking risks. Our brains have more downtime to rejuvenate.”
Yep! Life is so much better on the other side! No way I’d ever go back!
This is great! Growing up I had no idea what I wanted to do either… and really I still don’t. I can see my life going in many different directions and pursuing many different “careers”. Becoming FI will allow me to take those steps in the direction I want to go and not worry about the pay!
Yep. This one is a gem: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-09-02
Python’s pretty cool. I’ve done some interesting things with it like scrape gift card numbers and PINs from emails (I do gift card reselling) and control a browser through the Selenium library so that I can automate logging into my dozen or so Amex accounts and downloading the statements and transaction activity as a CSV file.
What I hate about it is it’s dynamically typed, so then when I’m reading someone else’s code and see a function return an object, I don’t have any sense of what type that object is until I go and look up that function. Ugh. Makes understanding other people’s code needlessly harder.
Hmmm, I’ll still give Python a shot. Ever look at Swift?
I mean don’t get me wrong, I still think there’s a lot to like about Python.. It’s got some really nice libraries because its so popular. And dynamic typing seems to be all the rage these days so I guess I’ll just have to get over that.
Never looked at Swift.
You might be blogging longer than you think. My FI blog is only a baby, but I started my personal blog (Dancing With Frogs) back in September 2007 and it’s still going strong.
What I’ve found with it is that as a new interest comes into my life, my posts change as I write about it and consequently my readership changes. I’ve got readers who’ve been with me the whole way, but most have joined somewhere along the way as they’ve found me through a subject of a post that they’ve been into.
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Very interesting. This made me think back about my blog. It’s certainly evolved too, so yeah, maybe I’ll just continue to evolve.
Everyone has dreams from a young age, and so do I. I want to be a good economist and now I can do it.
Sometimes we find happiness in the most unexpected places. As a kid, I had plans on becoming a carpenter. I loved how carpenters grab a piece of wood and turn it into a usable thing. Then computers entered my life and it was love for the first sight. The road was rocky and full of detours but the direction was always the same and in the end, I became a coder also. I always thought coding cannot be a wrong choice. If someone ever experienced the joy of finding a missing semicolon after two hours debugging, taking a problem to tear it into parts, solve them one by one, then put it together and see it working. I still remember how proud I was when I wrote my first Arabic to Roman number converter in Pascal. It took three days but I did it. Then now, seven years later in a job, the shine became worn off and my passion got rusty. Even started questioning myself if this is what I should do. Then I realized that the problem is not coding. If I have to be honest if a windfall would push me to FIRE tomorrow I would still like to continue coding. The problem I think is what I am working on, how I have to work and to whom I do work. Still thinking about a solution but maybe a transition to another life is waiting for me at the end of the tunnel 🙂 Thanks for sharing!
[HCF] recently posted…Staring into the FIRE
Wow HCF, I can relate to your initial love of coding. When coding is fun, it’s really fun. I still do it now. Hellow Swift and Python! But yeah, the job part of it that surrounds the work brings it down.
I just wanted to comment, my experience when I found MMM’s blog was the same. Actually, I had bookmarked Rootofgood, before that for some reason. My path started by accident when I was trying to figure out the best way to invest some money for my son’s future education expenses whatever that may be in the future. The rest started to snowball from there. I am only 1.5yrs into the path for FI, but so far so good.
That comic linked was great, I never really thought about life that way. I think I have had a few rebirths without even knowing it.