Chase Your Dreams: Mastering the Game to Leave the Game

I heard a story recently of a guy who was at the top of his game in the Finance & investing world. But he ended up leaving the industry after making his number. He ended up moving to Japan to learn baking and study the art of Matcha tea for 3 years. He returned to Taiwan, importing the best matcha tea from Japan and opening a top rated Matcha Cafe in Taipei. Living his dreams. I love these kinds of stories. 

How many of us are living zombie lives? Going through the motions, chasing the buck and burying our dreams. It’s so easy to say following your dreams is impractical. I get it. 

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to take a bad job, service job, corporate job or finance job when you start off. In fact, all of those experiences are SUPER helpful. You can learn a lot of how the world works. You learn what you like and don’t like. And there is nothing wrong with earning money either. And if you happen to end up being great at it or fall in love with the work, that’s awesome.  It’s really hard especially when you excel in an industry to then leave it behind. However, this will not be the experience for the majority of people. For most of them, like myself, this is just step one.

What you need to do is make sure you have a longer vision on where you want to go in life. I assume for most people it’s financial freedom, more time and having control of your life. And for this to happen, you must fight the hedonic treadmill and manage your cost structure carefully. Don’t let it get out of control like it did for me and pretty much 99.99% of people out there. Learn to differentiate between a need versus a want. Live with discipline or you will pay for it literally and figuratively. So you must learn to live a lean yet fulfilling life at least for a few years until your income streams and savings ramp up substantially. This is your margin of error.  

Otherwise, this escalating cost structure becomes the number one trap keeping you from doing what you want to do. It forces you to stick with that crap job and crap boss you can’t stand but have to tolerate. Because you need the paycheck to survive. What a sad situation that’s really of your own making. 

As the legendary Silicon Valley investor and philosopher Naval Ravikant has said: “The reason to win the game is so that you can leave the game.”