For me the revelation after trying some of those things has been really odd. Turns out that deep down I love the grind. Any time I go on an extended optimize-for-life-lived journey (1 month +), I come back and think ”Well shit, that was an entire month I got nothing done towards everything I want to achieve in life”
That is to say, it’s important to try these things but don’t get too hung up on not having them. Maybe deep down you just don’t wanna.
But you gotta try to find out. That part is true.
This may seem obvious and inevitable. It's not and only appears so in hindsight. Nothing in life is inevitable. If you want something to happen, you need to make it happen.
Once you're over 40, life becomes lived inside the margins of things that are inevitable, such as physical decline and, of course, ultimately death. The plays out by the shortened timeline and more painfully by the disappearance of parents, loved ones, and colleagues. There is a lot of important things in life that are indeed inevitable.
I've held marketing and media leadership roles. But I've been teaching myself to code for fun and realized I might need to focus on more technical roles when I found myself doing things like reading the OpenRTB and AdCOM API docs for fun, and hanging out with engineers and data science folks more than fellow marketers.
Would you mind sharing what sort of role you're in now and how you went about that pivot?
For my own story, my work, location and daily activities were not aligned with the life I wanted to live and weren't ever going to get me closer to what I wanted. I'd spent my 20's figuring out how to fit in, be likable, be a good employee. But the American dream is quite dead for most people and it was dead for me. Following the crowd was never going to even get me a white picket fence in my city, even if I'd wanted one.
The result has been the 6 most fantastically awesome years of my life. It's taken me to a new career, new locations, and new ways of doing everything. If you've read 4 hour work week, you'll know that Ferriss had years of adventures that most will never experience. It's been like that, but better.
If this is speaking to you. DO IT.