Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

This is a fascinating post – You Can’t Do What You Want By Doing Something Else. Some thoughts from that post are as below -

There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got “practical” and did something else “first.” The idea was that they’d be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the “practical” career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you’re doing.

Although we admire when someone can do something unique and creative, society is set up to resist such attempts. Your parents, with all the love and best intentions, will urge you to do something that “makes a good living.” Your friends and coworkers resist behaviors that might take you away from them, and will tell you stories of how this or that person tried and failed. And hardest of all, when you are ready to make your leap of faith, the temptations appear; the tremendous opportunities that for some reason only come out of the woodwork when you are ready to walk out the door.

There’s a quote that appears again and again in various forms: “close one door, another opens.” It seems like magical thinking until you see it happen. And it only happens when you don’t leave the door partially open, but instead firmly close it. For some reason, being certain that you’re ready to move on does cause some kind of magic to happen, and I don’t know why.

I’ve to admit that I’m in the exact same situation and I should be doing something about it. Coming from an Indian background, I can assert that most of the Indians fall into this “practical” and “society pressure” traps. Very few of us actually take a different route and explore their dreams. The rest of us just follow the herd. We’ll typically go for high-salaried jobs in Engineering, Medicine or Management profession. We hardly go for Music, Theatre or Sports career paths. Even in Engineering career, we’ll go for Computer Science and IT jobs – irrespective of if we really love that or not.

We hardly take risks. And we justify (read as give excuse) that we’re taking calculated risks by doing practical things now, and planning to take leap in future once we achieve some stability. On top of other social pressures, we immigrate to other countries for better career opportunities and loose our freedom and risk potential even more. We now also have visa and residency issues and we keep traveling other paths that we really do not want to. Everyday, we keep traveling away from our dreams. But we do it because everybody else is also doing the same. And we just keep doing it. Few days ago I posted a similar thought on Twitter -

But this article is a good eye-opener. I’m not sure even after reading this I’ll be taking corrective actions. You see, I’ve so many practical things to take care of first…