All of us have unexamined collection of beliefs, opinions, and points of view about how life works that we trust blindly and completely. We live by a rule book we wrote (or inherited) but never read. We think we know our limits, how far we can travel from the safety of the world we know, and what would happen if we jumped off the edge of the known world. For routine issues, automatically following this internal rule book works just fine, but with regard to choosing one’s life’s work, it pays to rewrite a few of the rules.
Yes, you might have to make some compromises along the way. But don’t start off assuming you have to make them. Just because you didn’t have a stellar history at college doesn’t mean you can’t become a doctor. Just because you are a middle manager with a wife, kids, two cars, and a mortgage doesn’t mean you cannot own your own successful beach bar in Negril. You can decide what compromises you are willing to make, if any. You can choose them consciously, rather than assuming there is no other possibility. In any event, the one way to avoid making unnecessary compromises is to challenge your assumptions and throw away the ones that aren’t useful.
