Let’s suppose
I do this often in vocational guidance of students
They come to me and say, well
"we’re getting out of college and
We have the faintest idea what we want to do"
So I always ask the question
"what would you like to do if
Money were no object?
How would you really enjoy spending your life?"
Well, it’s so amazing as a result
Of our kind of educational system
Crowds of students say well
We’d like to be painters
We’d like to be poets
We’d like to be writers
But as everybody knows
You can’t earn any money that way
Or another person says well
I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses
I said you want to teach in a riding school?


Let’s go through with it
What do you want to do?
When we finally got down to something
Which the individual says he really wants to do
I will say to him, you do that and forget the money
Because, if you say that getting the money
Is the most important thing
You will spend your life completely wasting your time
You’ll be doing things you don’t
Like doing in order to go on living
That is to go on doing things
You don’t like doing, which is stupid
Better to have a short life that is
Full of what you like doing than a long
Life spent in a miserable way
And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing
It doesn’t matter what it is
You can eventually turn it –
You could eventually become a master of it
It’s the only way to become a master of something
To be really with it
And then you’ll be able to get
A good fee for whatever it is
So don’t worry too much