The question I and many other college students get asked by family, friends, distant relatives, etc. is: “what do you want to do with your life?” This question takes many forms, but they are all equally daunting to an 18 year old college freshman, like myself. It presupposes a plan — as if I should have my life mapped out for the next 60 years. Instead, I learned that the flexibility to do what one loves — whatever that means — is a good enough plan for me.

PASSION

As the son of two nurses, growing up, I would come home from school hearing tales from the emergency room — tales filled with complicated medical terminology I couldn’t have dreamt up if I tried. Yet, just out of curiosity, one day I began learning, on Khan Academy, the basic ideas behind the medical concepts my parents discussed. Surprised by how quickly I picked it up, I went to show off my new knowledge to my parents. Sitting on our living room couch, I impressed them by telling them the name and location of every bone in the body. Medicine wasn’t something I was interested in, it was just something that I had heard, something that I was curious about. Yet for the next several months, when someone would ask me what I wanted to do in life, I’d respond with: “I want to be a doctor”. Without an interest in the field, it wasn’t long before I found learning about medicine laborious and not something I enjoyed doing. It was then that I realized the importance of passion. Passion isn’t tangible, but when realized it can possess someone to do great things — things they never thought they could. While one may enjoy further understanding their interests, a passion is all consuming —  you often think of it in your spare time, while you’re in the shower, and even when you should be paying attention to something important. 

I thought I wanted to do medicine because I knew my parents would like it if I did. While I was able to convince myself that medicine was my calling for a short period of time, it wasn’t long before I realized I didn’t enjoy learning it, I found it boring, and I surely didn’t want to spend my life learning about it. It was through this experience that I understood the Darwinian element intertwined with the choosing of a particular area to devote my life to. Choose the wrong career path, which I realized was one that I wasn’t passionate about, and I would surely hate it and ultimately regret it. Choose the right one, and I would, as Warren Buffett says, “tap dance to work”. The rewards for following your passion outweigh all else: it is the ability to do what you love and get paid for it. While it wasn’t immediately clear what that field was at the time for me, I knew that I had to find it. Just as importantly, I realized that the time spent doing what I thought others wanted me to do with my life, was time lost.

My experience of learning medical concepts taught me that intellectual curiosity is something that I find stimulating. Even now, I balance reading philosophy, history, and economics. For me personally, I knew that a career in business or law would be ideal just due to the diversity of specific areas of study. Who knows exactly what they want to do after just finishing high school? I don’t. So a broad area of interest with hundreds of different intellectual avenues to pursue made logical sense to me.

BUSINESS

In hindsight, I was a capitalist from birth. I liked to play Roblox in middle school, so it was only natural that I bought and sold Roblox accounts on eBay. I liked to trade football cards, so eventually I had an online process for exploiting the difference in value of the same football card on different marketplaces — what I called “collectibles arbitrage”. I had a natural passion for business growing up, and with the nature of the field being so broad, I can’t think of a better field for me to explore — both intellectually and professionally.

Now when someone asks me what I plan to do with my life, I simply respond: “business” — no specificity necessary.