Hold on to Your Dreams

At sixteen, I aspired to be a writer. During my senior year of high school, nearly every class I took pertained to writing in one way or another. I planned to attend the college with the best journalism school in Ohio, but after visiting the school I began to waver.

The counselor I met with did not present a rosy picture about job prospects for a journalism major. It was not an encouraging prognosis. I was not very confident in myself at that point in my life, and I pursued a different career path. I attended a technical school to learn about electronics and subsequently worked for IBM and Schlumberger. While I enjoyed the work, my desire to be a writer regularly surfaced.

In my mid-twenties, I realized that journalism wasn’t the only way to make a living as a writer. I don’t know why that thought didn’t occur to me sooner. After saving money for several years, I quit my job to work as a freelance writer.

I enjoyed some modest success as a freelancer, but after two years my savings were dwindling. After helping an acquaintance on a pressure washing job, I started a part-time pressure washing business. That proved to be more lucrative than my writing, and the business quickly grew. Within a few years, the business had morphed into a painting company, and I had fifteen people working for me. Though I continued to write when I could, sixty-hour weeks didn’t allow me much spare time.

The long hours wore on me, and my dream of being a writer grew stronger. I began investing in real estate and scaled back my business. I was soon working less than full time, and I wrote my first book, Individual Rights and Government Wrongs. Over the next ten years, I wrote three more nonfiction books. And then I began writing novels, which I now do full time. I am fulfilling my teenage aspirations.

I took a long and meandering path to become a full-time writer. In retrospect, I made some decisions along the way that weren’t ideal. But I don’t regret those decisions or the path I took. My experiences have proven invaluable in my writing.

The point of this story is that we should never abandon our dreams, even when life gets in the way. A large part of my motivation for becoming a freelance writer was to avoid regrets later in life. I didn’t want to reach middle-age and wonder, what if? What if I had tried to make a living as a writer? Happily, I don’t have to wonder.