Zen Pencils by Gavin Aung Than for February 10, 2014

Transcript:

Please Welcome Alan Watts. What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of situation would you like? I do this often in vocational guidance of students. They come to me and say: Well, um, we're getting out of college and we havn't the faintest idea what we want to do. So I always ask the question: What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? It's so amazing, the result of our educational system, that crowds of students say: Well, we'd like to be painters. We'd like to be poets. We'd like to be writers. I'd like to live an outdoors life and ride horses. But everybody knows you can't earn money that way! When we finally get down to something which the individual says they really want to do I will say to them... You do that. And forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing... you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living. That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing. Which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing... than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is... you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really 'with it.' And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. Therefore, it's so important to consider this question..."What do I deserve?" Alan Watts