26/11/2024
“Procrastination is the thief of time.”
- Edward Young (1683–1765).
This photo (and the lady taking it) represents both a lifetime of procrastination and just one thought, “F* it.”.
For a lot of my time as a young man I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Well, that’s not true, I think most of us know what we want to do with our time but what we want to do as a career is another thing altogether.
I worked some average paying jobs while I tried to figure it out, I did some exciting things too (that paid even less), I tried career paths that society deem to be the ‘good decision’, none of these satisfied enough of who I was at the core to keep me committed to the role. At the age of 26 I enlisted into the infantry, which was something I had wanted to do since a kid, but for one reason or another (or both) you take that off the cards, whether it’s for yourself or for others. My time in the infantry was the closest I ever felt to being somewhere I belonged, doing something that I felt I was naturally good at and being somewhere I felt useful. The main problem I had now was that a lot of my creative desires fell to the wayside, along with the freedom to get away from it all when I felt I wanted to explore. My time in the Army taught me a lot, but the one thing I really took away with me, was perspective. Life back on the outside seemed a hell of a lot easier now, it looked like a land of opportunity, where people’s opinions were just that and I had a much better sense of who I was now and what I was capable of. I almost felt as though, maybe, this is how most people feel when they leave high school and go straight into whatever it is they chose to do in life. It genuinely felt like a bit of a second chance but this time I knew what I had to do, I had to listen to myself, who I was, what I wanted out of life, how I wanted to spend my time, what I wanted to achieve, instead of thinking about what I ‘should’ be doing or what was considered ‘normal’.
Starting my YouTube channel made a few people close to home a little unsure, uneasy, what did that work even look like? How much will you earn? What if it doesn’t work out? But I had caught my thief. I hope you catch yours
