Today when people ask me that famous question – “If you could have any job, what would it be?” – I answer without hesitation: “Exactly what I am doing now.” It was not always this way. It was a process. But within my first year of practice, I set certain goals that I wanted to achieve by my five-year benchmark.
Why five years? (Reader: beware, this gets a bit existential.) The average life expectancy in the United States is approximately 78. By that measure, five years is arguably 7 percent of your life. In addition, you have spent approximately 25 percent of your life in school preparing for your career. We spend more than half of our waking hours at work; life is too short not to enjoy it. So five years into practice (which equates to roughly one-third of my life) was my benchmark to achieve these goals. As fate would have it, I had the unfortunate luck of seriously contemplating my mortality for the first time earlier this year, while recovering from a debilitating injury ironically, a little over five years into my practice. Needless to say, this gave new meaning to the goals I had set roughly five years earlier.
