As a kid as all kids do I thought that anything was possible and that I could be anything that I set my mind to be. Some things you learn quickly are not possible, you learn that flying is not possible when you try to take flight off the stairs, you learn that despite what the movies say, using the force is only a hollywood special effect. For years I maintained this general attitude, I was doing great and it seemed that not even the sky was the limit. After all my dream was to become an astronaut.


In sixth grade I had a change in heart. No longer did I care so much to become an astronaut. Our class was doing a project in computer class that involved us deciding what we wanted to be I changed my mind as most kids readily do and decided that instead I desired to become a detective. At that time I was watching shows such as CSI and I believed that was the way that being a detective worked. Halfway through the project we had to find the salary of a job we were considering. The student next to me took a look at the salary of being a detective and laughed explaining that the salary for their occupation was more than double mine. I looked at them and thought, “This guy ain’t gonna be
working anywhere but McDonalds. How could his salary be greater than mine?”. I reconsidered yet again and concluded that I wanted to be a soccer player. After all, if my classmate was expecting the salary he was expecting then I should have more than double his.

During the summer I was outside 24/7, I knew that becoming a professional soccer play would require a large amount of time practicing and expected to reach professional level from just practicing regardless of the intensity of the practicing. So I would spend most of the day outside practicing in the
blistering heat seemingly as hot as the sun with minimal effort with the illusion that my time spent outside would eventually make me reach the professional level.


When the fall soccer season started I was astonished to find out that despite all the effort I put in I hadn’t made much progress. Sure I had become much better than I had been before but I hadn’t made the amount of progress that I wanted, I was still only at the level of the better soccer players of my age . All my work had made hardly any progress and I wondered why. I blamed it on natural talent, bad luck for me. It seemed like singing to me, you could practice all you want but you still need the right voice to succeed, a voice that I did not have.
My seventh grade year has been my worst thus far, I gained interest in becoming a translator after discovering that my dream of becoming a soccer player was impossible without any work. A translator I figured would become a very important role with the increase of foreign people in the United States. School was going good at first, I was loving Spanish however midway through the year a long term substitute completely changed my opinion about Spanish. I learned almost nothing and was getting
bad grades in Spanish. I quickly learned to greatly hate Spanish so I moved on to other things, I looked to every other subject: mathematician, historian, author, scientist, the list goes on. I looked to every corner of what I had been learning and still I could not find anything that interested me. I disliked all my classes and dreaded every period not at the fault of the teacher except for Spanish class. The worst of it all was that the days seemed to drag on slower than a snail my grades suffering the whole way. I completely lost interest in the curriculum, the times when I did my homework I did it very poorly, or it was copied from someone the period before. I quickly dropped from my A and B+ grades down to
C’s and D’s during certain times in the year without a care in the world. The only motivation I had was that my parents repeatedly would take away things from me in an attempt to make me focus more on my work. Of course every kid has a feeling of not wanting to submit to authority and so I wanted my grades to be just above the c range. The whole year went on in a pattern of my grade dropping below B then barely coming back before dropping again. My salvation was track practice and track meets, I felt like I was running away from my problems and could escape them if I ran hard enough, I used my frustration and anger and fuel and worked harder than I ever have, my mile time improved by slightly more than half a minute that year. I enjoyed being away from my parent bugging me about my grades for that short time after school, I wanted to extend this time so I suggested that she come to pick up my backpack and then I could just run home, my mom thought I would be hit by a car and didn’t agree to it and so I spent the rest of the year pretending to do homework in my room when really I was just watching movies like saw which my mom said I was too young to be watching.

In the months before eighth grade after I had watched almost every movie in the house I was
watching many comedies on youtube and I came across a lecture by Alan Watts. The title of this lecture was What If Money Was No Object and it changed the way that I think about what I’m doing. In his lecture Alan Watts said: “Forget the money, because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing then you will be completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing to continue living that is doing things you don’t like doing” . Hearing those words made me realize that if you enjoy something enough then you can become a master of it and be able to find a way to
make enough money out of it to be able to continue doing it and with the proper motivation doing what you enjoy doing not matter what it is becomes possible. From that day forward I was no longer looking to get the job that would get me money but rather one that I would enjoy.

When eighth grade started I was no longer looking to do the things that would get me the most money but was waiting to discover what I would enjoy doing. Waiting, because it’s not something that can be forced, much like you can’t force yourself to fall asleep, you just let it happen, just before you fall asleep your mind wanders, exploring, this is the way that I learned how to find what I really want. You let it happen and it will come to you, you explore and eventually it will come to you.