But at the end of the day, I just love impacting the world and providing people a chance at doing the same.
I want to create an organization that is essentially a 6 week retreat for students before they begin college. Selecting the best applicants possible, they will go through rigorous training to become their most successful selves, covering Academics, Social life, Health, and Lifestyle topics. Elements of secrecy will help it's applicant pool, I was heavily inspired by the Bohemian Club.
Long term, the alumni network itself will more than make up for the cost, in turn making the applicant pool stronger and stronger.
It's an aggressive plan, and requires years of building up from the ground. But it's my dream to make it happen.
And if it doesn't work, I'll fall back on becoming an accounting professor. Pretty similar jobs anyhow.
Send me an email (in my profile) and I'll send you an update when I finish the posts (few weeks). I'd love to have someone to bounce ideas off of - and judging by your profile and comments you may be able to offer good feedback!
2) Not actually, nor having to perpetually severely worry about, being screwed over with respect to basic quality of life. Access to reasonable and effective health care. A decent place to live (for me, that means mostly quiet and hopefully with a decent portion of friendly neighbors). Knowing that when I can no longer work, I won't end up in a hell hole.
Sounds pretty modest, doesn't it?
Yet today, in the U.S., it's becoming increasingly illusive and uncertain.
A major downside of categorizing into "winners" and "losers" and focusing on some dystopian fervor for a modern-day "manifest destiny."
In my case, some crap health care (despite my relatively affluent circumstances) set the stage early for additional struggle. Things just kept spiraling down, and the advice I received only reinforced this.
Now -- too late -- I believe you can't have these things, unless you make your primary job learning how to and practicing sticking up for yourself.
I think a lot of my generation got quite fucked over by unrealistic instruction such as "the bully is only hurting himself", "collaboration [undifferentiated, un-qualified] is the future", "things will turn out all right in the end", "you're so [smart|pretty|special]", etc.
So now, my ideal career would be teaching all this by example.
Whatever you do, teach by example.
Sadly, I think those jobs are mostly reserved for people who went through academic programs and have a bunch of letters after their name, so I stick around in the land of pragmatism.
I am not saying that people are wrong for requiring these credentials, I'm just saying that that's what precludes me from a research job.
I'm working on turning my garage into a fully licensed winery so I can start producing hard cider commercially.
So in a perfect world, my time would be split 70/30 where 70% of my is spent making/distributing/marketing hard cider. Then 30% of my time is spent on lifestyle software businesses/applications