I wouldn't even make plans.
I don't mean that "totally" seriously, but I do mean it in a sense. The best decision I ever made in my life I made on my 29th birthday in 1976. I was setting in my office on upper Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC where I was the District Manager for H & R Block with 18 offices and 180 employees. I looked around me at a very nice wood paneled office, my 3-piece Geoffrey Beane Suit, A Triumph in the parking lot and started asking myself a silly question. Are you going to be happy staring a four office walls the rest of your life? Why aren't you happy? I had a damn good job, nice house, 2 new cars, a brand new wife who was 10 years my junior, what's to not like! But I wasn't happy.
I called my then wife and told her my dilemma and she told me to go do what I wanted to do. Don't worry about the security, we'll make it somehow. Ah, don't you just love youth! Their naivety about the need for security. Somehow, over the previous 8 or 9 years I had become the establishment - a far cry from that weekend in 69 that I found myself at a farm in upstate New York that became the icon for my whole generation. I had somehow lost that ability.
Anyway, before the day was over, I had submitted my resignation after 10 years with the company. I went to a commercial deep sea diving school in Oakland California in the beginning of '77 and then embarked on a totally new direction in life. That eventful birthday was the beginning of a fantastic new journey that I wouldn't have traded for anything. I took a hobby and turned it into a well paying trade (gave up a profession) that eventually took me all over the world. It's how I got here. No regrets. (I lost that wife during the process but sometimes that's the way things go. My current wife and I have been together 25 years now.
I agree. In the words of that famous sport shoe manufacturer........
JUST DO IT!
