Born to Do It.

I always had a tendency to procrastinate by watching and reading lots of materials dedicated to self-development, investing, business and entrepreneurship. I never had any particular reflection on why this was the case.

I just felt that watching self-development materials on YouTube works better for my long-term personal growth than watching random shit-shows. It also makes me feel better about myself, overall.

Why Do I Keep Turning to Self-Development Content?

Whenever I self-educate myself, I never get this itchy feeling of wasting my free time. Funny enough, according to some research, this tendency to spend time on self-help literature correlates positively with life-long success.

According to Noe, Tews and Marand (2013), individual differences such as self-efficacy and personal “zest” are strong predictors of engagement. This engagement takes the form of self-directed, informal learning outside of formal education or training.

Obviously, correlation is not causation. It is hard to determine whether people who self-educate themselves become successful because this knowledge contributes directly to their development.

Or rather, they become successful because they are naturally ambitious. Their internal motivation is the common cause of both life-long successes and a tendency to feed yourself with self-help materials.

Anyways, one insight I remember from all these materials is that entrepreneurs always underscore how difficult it is to go against your relatives and friends. This is especially true when it comes to risking, investing and dropping day jobs on behalf of starting new ventures. They typically declare that going against their family’s expectations, was a big mental burden throughout their careers as entrepreneurs.

According to Duckworth et al. (2007), sustained perseverance toward long-term goals predicts success beyond talent.

What Am I Doing With My Career Right Now?

Recently, I have found myself back on the job market again, and I started to think about what to do next.

At some point during my PhD, I realized that there is so much to do around academia. It is probably more useful for the rest of the world if I turn most of my attention elsewhere. I focus on making little contributions to the global improvements in this area.

This is rather than working on just one more method for data analysis to show off my competences as a researcher. It is also rather than working to feed my academic CV. It is rather than appending a dictionary of thousands of available methods existing on the market already by one more item.

I also felt that I started floating away from the original, focused goal to become a professor of neuroscience in a natural, organic way.

Namely, ever since I got all the time in the world to plan my day, it rarely becomes a ‘research day’ or a ‘programming day’.

Most often, it turns into a ‘writing day’, a ‘networking day’ or a ‘logistics day’ instead. I badly wanted to be a scientist ever since I was 6 years old.

This means that I was fixated on one vision of what I am going to do with my life for the past 27 years. Now, I am in a phase when this vision is slowly falling apart. Some other talents, desires, and interests are coming to the surface instead.

And I am confused. It feels a bit like a very long term relationship coming to an end: trains of thoughts come to your head every day.

What Questions Keep Running Through My Head?

Why did it happen? Whose fault was this?

Is there anything good still waiting out there? How to deal with grief?

How to proceed so that the next time, everything works out just perfectly? Is it better to focus on self-development for now, or is it better to start something else immediately?

And here comes the joke. In my case, family and friends react completely differently than in most cases I ever heard of.

Instead of persuading me to get myself a stable job and start aging with dignity, they try to persuade me to go the opposite direction. They try to persuade me to become an entrepreneur instead.

What Does Everyone Around Me Think I Should Do?

My mother, my father, my grandmother, my friends – all of them claim that I am simply not the type of a payroll worker. They believe I would suffocate if I became one.

I also talked to some people I know, who are in their fifties and sixties. They managed to develop successful careers as professionals hired at public and private institutions. Many of these people, although undeniably successful, hide some deep regrets that they never tried the dangerous yet exciting entrepreneurial path.

And, they try to persuade me to try as well. For more, no one knocks at my door saying that they would be willing to employ me.

Instead, plenty of people knock at my door saying that they would like to partner up with me or work for me. All this makes me even more confused as I feel that plenty of people I personally know, project their own buried dreams onto me.

Entrepreneurship is an extremely difficult and stressful job. Elon Musk famously compared developing a company to eating glass and staring into the abyss.

And when you search online, you find that not everyone is happy about the fact that they became entrepreneurs, according to Stephan (2018). A review of over 140 studies found that entrepreneurs’ mental health and well-being is often no better than that of employees in traditional jobs. Sometimes, it is even worse.

It is a difficult path and it could simply not work out in the end. According to U.S.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data, roughly half of new establishments do not survive their first five years. It is actually much more likely that it does not work than that it does…

So Where Does That Leave Me?

And so, this is it: I am standing on the crossroads in the middle of nowhere. A lot of voices in the back of my head, but nothing looming on the horizon.

And, I am standing up there for a while now. So, it is time to finally make some decision and go one way or the other before it gets dark.