More Wisdom from Dad
If I was to council you about achieving what most would consider to be a meaningful life, I would have you start at age 75 and work backwards. What do you want, at that age, to have achieved? Then, working back from there, I would walk you through a plan – one that would provide a good chance of achieving your long-term desires, provide for increasing long-term stability, would provide you some flexibility in case you wanted to change course along the way, and would enable you to find balance between the work of the long-term goal and having a reasonable amount of mindless fun as you went along. It would include stepping out of your comfort zone and taking on some challenges requiring hard work without short-term rewards and sacrifices of some expenses and leisure but would ultimately make you feel better about yourself and your life and confident that you were heading in a positive direction.
And conforming with the system for a period of time would enable you to understand the system well enough to determine how to get the heck out of it and beat it. Trying to play the game without following the rules – when you don’t even know the rules – can’t work. Play the game for a while with the rules so you can learn how to effectively cheat.