Bill Perkins, author of Die with Zero, preaches the importance of matching desires to age.
He illustrates with this example: if you enjoy the strip club, the best age to enjoy the strip club is before you’re married and have kids; ideally, before you’re ready to date. If this desire goes unrequited into marriage and parenthood, that’s going to be a problem.
Don’t worry about me, I have no strip clubbing to purge from my system, no “legs and eggs” brunches calling my name; but I do own another desire, one I neglected a decade ago, that I reckon with now as I start a different career:
During my young adulthood, I failed to get good at something I loved.
From age 25 to 33, I got proficient at medicine. I pursued mastery with reckless abandon. I put in my 10,000 hours. Why? For one, it’s hard not to exert tremendous effort in your twenties. For two, I fooled myself into believing medicine was a continuation of another passion. From age 23 to 25, in the two years immediately before medical school, I taught health to middle and high schoolers. I loved this job. I loved learning. Then, I went to medical school, where I again loved learning about the machinations of the human, but learning is not medicine. There’s a massive difference between classroom and ICU. Residency, where learning takes a backseat to doing, was what broke me. And ultimately, I arrived here.
I chose the safest path during the most risk accommodating period of adulthood. I mismatched desires and age-appropriate behavior. When I could have been failing at something I loved, I perfected something I didn’t.
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Here and now, as my age and goals have shifted, I live a riskier path during the period of life where conservatism makes more sense. Here and now, I can’t go back a decade and get good at my passions with minimal risk. Yet, here and now, I can’t sell my soul down the river for cents on the dollar in the name of practicality. “There’s a fine line between being practical and being a candyass”, I’ve heard Steven Rinella say. I don’t want to be a candyass. I want to figure out how to make amends and move forward.
I want a family. I want us to own our home. I want to build our dreams. In addition, I want to live purposeful, meaningful work that allows me to be the best version of myself for my family. I believe these two visions are compatible, if I can make honest compromises. If I lean too far into risk or too far into practicality, both of these paths look like the candyass path. I must be realistic and idealistic.
I am working full-time at personally meaningful endeavors, which makes it possible to be practical again. I do need to make more money. We do need to chip away at the loans. We do need to save more. And I want to take those actions. While living out my practicality-dominated existence in medicine, my only way out seemed a cliff jump into the sea of risk.
But that’s not life anymore. I have bridges. I have choices. I have awareness.
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(Photo Caption: Living in practicality, dying to risk, circa 2016. Fast forward seven years, I’m living in risk, dying for some practicality.)
