What if money was no object?

Alan Watts, Zen Master.

The question of how to find what you love is perhaps one of the most important questions you will ever ask yourself.
We who have found and love the Way of the Showman are lucky. People tell me that I am lucky to get to live this life style, to travel the world and have so much fun and enthusiasm about what I do. Part of me feels a little miffed. To get here took more than luck.
You make your own luck and the harder you work the luckier you get. The luck part for me is that I found what I love and that I found it so early. I really have been doing what I love for my entire life.
When I listen to the words in the clip below I find that the words not only resonate deeply with me, they also very much describe choices I have taken in life.
Believe me when I say that there were time I could not rub two cents together. (Often because I was in a country which didn't use dollars and cents, but still). I did not decide to squeeze through two tennis rackets or to swallow swords because I thought it would make me rich. Just like the Zen Master predicted, that came later ;-).

"…If you do really like what you are doing - it doesn't really matter what it is - you can eventually become a master of it. It's the only way of becoming the master of something, to be really with it. And then you will be able to get a good fee for whatever it is."

This is an inspiring oration by the Illuminated Alan Watts and his thoughts are worthy of some serious contemplation.

"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 the 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! Another person says 'Well I'd like to live an out-of-door's life and ride horses.' I said 'You wanna 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 which you like doing then a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you are doing - it doesn't really matter what it is - you can eventually become a master of it. It's the only way of becoming the master of something, to be really with it. And then you will be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much, somebody is interested in everything. 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 spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like and to teach our children to follow the same track. See, what we are doing is we are bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lifes we are living. In order 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?"

- Alan Watts