I’ll never forget the time I shyly told a boy I liked that I wanted to be a writer. “And what will you do when that falls through?” he asked.
That comment, which I’ll guess he put exactly two nanoseconds of thought into, echoed in my head for years afterward. With every failed manuscript, every rejection, every bump in the road. What will you do when that falls through?
Because I didn’t know. If writing didn’t work out for me, I had absolutely no idea.
Maybe that’s why this wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson makes me smile: “Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.”
How true is that? And not just for risky careers like writing, for every aspect of life. Parenting and friendships and what you eat and how you study and what bands you like. There’s always someone who wants to tell you why you’re wrong. And if you can learn early on to ignore those who jump to tell you how wrong you are, you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration.