Choices in life

A career bromide as worn as the steps to the Nauru Building goes like so: Do what you like to do, young man, and then your work won’t seem like work, life will be happy and, fortuitously, the money will flow into your pockets.

I guess the theory behind this theory is that if you like what you do, you’ll be good at it, hence well compensated for it, hence better compensated than you’d be in alternative pursuits.

There are a lot of logical leaps in that chain. If just one link of logic breaks, the whole idea falls apart.

It’s a bigger issue on Saipan than most places. Paradise attracts adventurers, free thinkers, entrepreneurs, and other hardy escapees from the confines of cubicles. Sure, the Commonwealth does have a few bores, but they’re usually whining in their own little echo chambers and nobody else pays much attention to them.

But for the most part there are a lot of people in the CNMI who are very well-qualified to discuss the “do what you like” adventure of professional paths.

But don’t look to me for an answer. I’m still puzzling it out. I’m always wondering if I should have been going out on limbs when my more sensible pals were heeding the wisdom from the great poet Robert Service: “It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the life long race.”

Service should know. He left England to follow his dream of being a cowboy in the wild outback of British Columbia.

And he wound up being a bank clerk.

Well, bank clerk for a while, at least. Then he became a rich and famous poet, penning (and, more importantly, selling) verses inspired by the adventures and adventurers he saw all around him.

What would have become of him had he not taken his bank job, and instead rode his doomed cowboy dream into the mud, and lived, and died, in failed obscurity, as is the lot of most dreamers? It’s a safe bet that getting a day job is what allowed him to become a literary superstar. On the other hand, had he not followed his audacious and risky dream to British Columbia to begin with, he may likely have still languished in obscurity. So I can’t untie this knot, it seems to both uphold, and pull apart, its own logic.

I think the best we can do is observe that he seems to have played his cards as best as he could at the time, and did a darned good job of it. He was obviously a man willing to take risks and bet his fate on the outcome, which is more than most people are willing to do.

From what I’ve seen, it is the steady, quiet, plodding ones who wind up on top, yet this doesn’t mean that they are drones at all. The happiest folks I know have used their professional credentials to create independent gigs: Doctors, dentists, and lawyers, typically, who don’t have to work for somebody else as wage slaves. They can set up their own practices as they see fit. They can live in big cities, or in small towns, or even (yes!) on remote tropical islands.

* * *

So let’s turn from the mush of reflection to something quantitative, which illustrates the difficulty of making seemingly easy choices in life. Consider a game of chance that a player gets to play only once, and then he has to walk away from the table for good. Here is the game, in which only one of two choices can be made by the player:

Choice 1 is a coin toss, in which the player gets $1 million if it’s heads, but no money at all if it’s tails.

Choice 2 is even simpler: The player gets a briefcase containing $300,000.

Which would a “rational” person choose? And which would you choose? Which would your spouse choose?

As for my answer, I’ll give it to you next week.