To find your heart’s work, you must listen within, ignore the critics and be brave enough to leap.
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In my early 20s, I drove over two hours in the middle of a frigid Michigan winter to see Kurt Vonnegut speak. I was excited to see one of my literary heroes, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt for an aspiring writer to get some career inspiration. The name of his talk was “How to Get a Job Like Mine.” Once he got on stage, he cheekily admitted that the title of his speech was a ploy to get people to come to his event, which made me love him even more.
Thousands of people have entered the cannabis industry since I started a decade ago, and the top question I get is how to get a job like mine. I like to joke that you need to work in corporate, get fed up, take time off, switch to nonprofits and then get stage III colon cancer in your late 30s, but it’s more nuanced. It’s about finding what feeds your soul, stimulates your mind and finding work that, no matter what, you move heaven and earth to do, even if that means temporary financial hardship and sacrifice. It’s a deep resonance that not many people find.