So, no one told you life was gonna be this way? Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A? No need to sweat the small stuff. You’ll find your soulmate, rich people keep assuring us that money doesn’t buy happiness and if you hate your job, you can get a new one! Ahhh, can you smell that? That’s freedom.
If you’ve settled for a particular job that just isn’t getting your creative juices flowing, or perhaps you’ve simply had enough of Martha from accounting shooting you disapproving looks for eating pasta before midday (it’s totally fine, pasta’s an essential food group), here’s a little helping hand to get you started on your journey to greener grass.
It’s Never Too Late
You know those overly eager mature-age students who are exceptionally endearing however they keep encouraging the professor to give you more work which completely derails your plans to have a stress-nap? That could be you!
Seriously though, if you have a passion for a career that requires further education, what’s stopping you? If you’re hesitant because you don’t want to spend over three years studying, this is where places like Shillington come in. You can enrol without any previous experience and their graphic design courses can be smashed out in three months, so, here’s the plan. Tell your spouse/loved ones/parents that you’re going on a “soul-cleansing” retreat for three months, come back to them with a full-blown portfolio and you can start your new life. You don’t even have to lie to them about the retreat, it just sounded more 007 that way and I love a good spy narrative. Each to their own.
Know What You Want
There’s a lot of risks involved in the ‘quit now, worry later’ technique that a few of us opt for. Essentially the risk is that your cash flow has come to a halt and now you’re stressing out because you’ve calculated how many more weeks rent you can cover before going broke, and it’s not pretty. Baked beans are looking like the staple for the coming months and your old job with judgemental Martha is as enticing as ever.
If you need to earn money while you study towards your “best self” (I was really trying to refrain from using clichés like that, but here we are), switch that course to a part-time venture so you can still feed your online shopping habit (which is totally under control by the way, nobody look into it though) and still get that design portfolio in nine months. It took me nine months of uni to figure out that assignments were a mandatory requirement, so it’s a drop in the ocean.
The World Is Your Oyster
It’s a dilemma as old as time. If you go back to school to get your study on, when will you get the opportunity to pretend to make a phone call in a London telephone booth for a hilarious and totally original tourist snap?
Conveniently, you can now study abroad because it’s 2018 and risking scurvy to take a four-month trip to your destination of choice is no longer the norm. Shillington even offers Student Visas for the Big Apple, so if New York is more your cup of tea, they’ve got you sorted. BOOM! Problem solved. Any other curveballs you want to lob my way? I’ve got an answer for everything.
Forget Failure
This might be easier said than done, but it’s completely true. If you’re already contemplating taking a risk to pursue a career you actually love, you’ve come further than most. Go even further, put it all on the line and trust your instincts. Trained professionals are there to help and if worse comes to worse you can always fall back on what you were doing before. Not to scare you, but what if you’re 120 years old (I trust modern medicine will allow us to live that long in the near future, colour me optimistic) and kicking yourself because you spent 60 years of your life secretly eating pasta in the toilets at 10am to avoid Martha’s gaze? Exactly. It’s just not worth it.
TL;DR? Here’s old m8 Shia LaBeouf to sum it up.
