When you get the chance to give up everything and have an adventure, does it ever make sense?
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The first time I left the US, I was 26-years-old. My wife and I were moving to Italy. We were equal parts scared and excited. Neither of us spoke Italian; both of us were leaving good jobs and our families behind. It was the hardest choice of our lives, getting on that plane. How did we know it was the right decision?
It turns out that making a decision like this requires you to forget things. To disregard them, because they are based in fear.
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We didn’t. But we knew staying wasn’t the right one either.
When my wife applied for the PhD position in Italy, we thought it was a long shot. She didn’t really want to go back to school after a rocky path to her Master’s degree, and we both had decent jobs in the industries we wanted. We were looking at a house, thinking about getting a dog, we were even weighing the option of children.
When they offered her the position, we had a month to decide. And all of that planning seemed to be thrown out the window. The position was amazing. It was exactly what she wanted, working on wine research in a valley in the Italian Alps. There wasn’t a lot of money in it, but it was a fantastic opportunity. One we had no idea if we wanted to take.
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We fought. Every night. It was the first time we had really fought about anything serious. And this fight was weird. Each night, we would be on different sides from where we were the night before. Each night, one or both of us would end up sitting on the edge of the bed crying, paralyzed by indecision. And I don’t mean that figuratively. One of us would be sitting there, thinking about the enormous weight of the two choices, feeling completely unable to move.
It turns out that making a decision like this requires you to forget things. To disregard them, because they are based in fear. Here are four things we had to forget in order to chase our dreams.
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Forget the fear of never working again
I worked in games, as a Designer. I had worked toward that goal for years, and getting into that industry was not easy. It terrified me to think that I could be locked out of the job and the industry I loved, because I decided to go have an adventure. I think my wife was more scared of it than I was. She knew that working in games made me happy, and hated the idea of me being miserable because she wanted to chase a dream.
But we had to forget that fear. As long as I can work on my own projects, learn new things, and have new experiences, I will come out the other end a better designer. I see the world as a series of game systems already, so, logically, the more of the world I can see, the more I have to draw on.
And why can’t I start a studio of my own? It’s scary, but every great business started because someone had the courage and the will to take the leap.
Forget the fear of going broke
We aren’t individually wealthy. Neither of us has a trust fund, and we’d always had two incomes. The fear of going broke from this was real, and was the closest thing we had to an actual reason not to go.
But we didn’t —and still don’t— have kids. We didn’t own a house, or have a house payment. We didn’t even have any debt, beyond a credit card each and a small student loan. The biggest things we owned were two aging cars. On top of that, our family promised us we would not end up penniless from this adventure.
Others may not find themselves in this position. Money may be a real limiting factor in whether you can chase your dreams, but for us, it was just fear. And we had to forget it.
Forget the fear of losing your friends
Going on an adventure across an ocean from everyone we knew, we were afraid that our friends would move on, stop talking to us, stop liking us. This was silly, and unfair to them. It is so easy to keep in touch, no matter where you are, in the age of the internet.
As for new friends? Friends don’t happen by magic, or luck. You aren’t given friends. You make friends. There are many resources for finding people with similar interests all over the world. Expat forums, sports teams, game groups, dance classes, we’ve used them all. And they work.
You aren’t going to be alone unless you want to be. Forget it.
Forget the fear of the unknown
This one is the hardest, because it is a basic human fear. We are always afraid of what we don’t know. We didn’t speak Italian. How would we communicate? What was this place going to be like to live in? What if one of us was injured? Or sick?
But we could learn Italian. People have been living in Italy for thousands of years, we’d be fine. And universal healthcare takes a lot of the fear out of being sick or injured.
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Beyond that, fearing the unknown is something we had to put aside. We would prepare as best we could, and figure out the rest as we went. We had to trust ourselves to be capable enough humans to handle anything life threw at us. After all, isn’t that the point of an adventure?
It took us until the last day to decide, and what we came to was this: Fear alone is never a reason to not do something. Every reason we had not to go was fueled only by fear. But everything that mattered, everything we needed, we could make happen with a little work. And if there is one thing our fathers taught us, it’s to never be afraid of a little hard work.
Sometimes you get the option to have an adventure. Sometimes, taking that option doesn’t make sense. But when the only reasons not to go boil down to being afraid, forget them. The best adventures are scary. Those are the ones where you get to learn about yourself.
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Photo: Eric Chan/Flickr
amazing words! amazing adventure! amazing couple!
P.S. please tell M that she is always in my kitchen AND my heart while I bake her famous lemon (or orange. talk about life decisions!) cake.
Thomas –great article!
My own life is defined by “jumping into the abyss” –and more than once.
I’m in the middle of my biggest “adventure” ever (tons of uncertainty, incredible “ahas” and definitely the roller coaster ride of my life –and I’m turning 63 this January :))
I can tell you this though –every time it has turned out for the better, typically *much* better than if I hadn’t made the move.
Life is far to short to play it safe and personally, I think the worst regrets are those things we didn’t have the courage to do.
Thanks Michael!
My wife and I have been in this adventure for almost 2 years now, and have at least one more to go. And you’re right, we’ve gotten more out of it than we ever could have expected. But at the same time, it has been harder than we could have guessed. Had we known then what we knew now, I’m pretty sure we would have still gone for it, but with some different planning. Learning Italian to a fluent level first, for example…
~Thomas