My favourite TED talk is the talk by Larry Smith on “Why You Will Fail To Have A Great Career”.
It is also my worst nightmare. It is what keeps me looking hard for problems that I believe in, that I want to be assosciated with. I take part in multiple forums just trying to see what would interest me. After all, if you want to commit all your time to working on something, you might pick up something that you really believe in. Or you have to be one motivated personality (which I know I rarely am). I need a reason to do things however silly the reason may be. But I cannot fool myself into believing there is a good enough reason. Catch-22, right?
And now with a 18 month old, I truly believe my time is running out. If I didn’t identify a problem that I want to try and solve, and start working on it (even if only part time) sometime about now, I won’t be able to try my hand at building a business around the solution without successfully jeopardising his education. Or his college fund. So if I didn’t do this in the next 1-2 years, I can hope to get back only when am in my 50s which is when, and if he chooses to, my son would be in college and on his own, hopefully. I really hope it doesn’t become fashionable for kids to live with their parents around that time 😀
But there is another issue with that. My vision for my retirement is not at all ambitious. The most ambitious part of my retirement plan is to live in a fast paced city like New York or London or at least Singapore CBD. But all I want to be doing there is some volunteering, some dog walking, some gardening and maybe teach a few kids a few things I might know by that time. Basically keep it very simple and not try to make any money I didn’t already make by that time. Very depressing, you might think, for someone who claims to want to be an entrepreneur. I don’t care, but that’s how I see it.
So. That’s what am worried the most about these days, that I would tell him –
“I would have done all those things son, but then you were born”!