Ono Travels

As a student in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was taught early on that the “responsible” thing to do was to get a prestigious job with a decent salary and settle down with the trappings of a middle class American life. Whether or not I enjoyed my job was irrelevant – that was what hobbies were for.

So I did the responsible thing and spent years pursuing a career in IT. Not only did it pay well, but there were also many opportunities for career advancement. However, there was one problem:

I hated it.

No, I didn’t hate the subject matter. What I hated was the realization that I was basically relegating myself to working in an office for the rest of my life. At the time, I convinced myself that I was being overly idealistic and simply lacked discipline. After all, everyone else I knew worked very hard at (what I considered) boring jobs in order to provide their families with a high standard of living. Yet they were happy, right?

In the years that followed, I became increasingly uncomfortable with this philosophy. Why couldn’t I become self-employed and do something that I was honestly passionate about? The short answer is that I was too scared and guilt-ridden. Scared because, in order to do that, I would have to knowingly remove myself from the relative stability of corporate life and rely solely on myself. Guilt-ridden because I was preoccupied with prestige – the opinions of those around me.

Well, no longer. My move to Taiwan has already benefited me in several ways. Most importantly, it’s allowed me to remove myself from the professional and social constraints that made my goal of self-employment unachievable. I’ve run out of excuses about why I can’t do it….now it’s time to move forward and actually give it a go. I have no doubt that there will be many struggles ahead, but now that I’ve clearly identified what I love to do and how to do it, I’m already well on my way to success.