If you are privileged enough to have some personal agency in seeking a career path that will pay your bills and provide personal satisfaction, you then must strive to be one of the lucky few who can identify the difference between a vocation and an avocation.
I was always ambitious, like many who are told from a young age that they are capable of doing and being anything they set their minds are. Success is yours to lose!
I’ll never forget what it felt like to drive on the Universal Pictures backlot for my internship interview after taking the Studio Tour countless times growing up as a theme park annual pass holder. (When I turned on my car, “Buck in Here” by DJ Felli Fel was on the radio — oh, to be living your dream in 2007!) By the end of my internship, I’d been offered a job as an assistant to the Executive Vice President of Production — a role practically unheard of for a 20-year-old recent graduate who’d only spent one semester interning in the industry.
All the assistants in the department encouraged me to take the job, but on a lark (and with surprising support from my parents) I had decided to take a gap year to travel and work on my creative writing before spending the next four decades or so sitting in an office.
While traveling abroad, I met someone. If I had taken such a massive gamble on my career, this future I had let…
