By Ethan Maurice | September 3, 2015
Alan Watts, the man credited with bringing eastern philosophy to western civilization, lays out a simple logical argument for doing what you really want to do in life.
"What makes you inch? What sort of a situation would you like?
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 of 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, 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. Another person says I'd like to live an out of doors life and ride horses.
I say, do you want to teach at 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 your doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry to much, somebody's interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in you'll find others who are.
But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on doing things you don't like and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See what we're doing is we're bringing up children, educating them, to live the same sort of lives we're living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. So it's all retch and no vomit, it never gets there.
And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question:
What do I desire?"
