For all the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up all the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way. – Tim Ferriss

Your incredibly loud and obnoxious alarm clock rings, at a time when your exhausted body says, “What? Already?”

You beat the clock senseless until it stops beeping, grudgingly get up and shuffle to the restroom.

You look in the mirror, eyes weary, oh-so-tired, and you think to yourself, “God. What the hell. I hate this.”

You finish getting ready and head outside to endure a long, stressful, and completely unnecessary jam-packed commute. You realize, you’re commuting to a place you do not want to go to. To a job you no longer enjoy or find satisfaction and meaning in.

And then you realize … your life has no satisfaction and meaning. You feel no joy. You feel … nothing.

Crap. Now what?

If this describes your day-to-day life, the feeling you have within you, a sinking realization that you’re doing something so completely against your nature, against your dreams, against your life calling, then you need to do something about it.

Now.

It’s now or never. Now. Or never.

Never Live a Life With Regrets

There are worries and fears and barriers, of course. Internally and externally. Doing something that goes against the vast majority of society will always bring about heartache and trouble.

But if you can get through this, you will never, ever live a life with regrets.

I tell my parents, after I’ve already made a decision to quit my day job, one that was severely unfulfilling doing work I hate, that this is my life. Not theirs.

And they need to let me go.

Let me go.

For their own sake and for mine.

There comes a time in one’s life, when everything changes. When your life will never be the same. That time came for me on the night of Friday, September 17, 2010, when I endured the worst night of my life.

Everything I’ve ever experienced, from the time I was left by my mother for 4 years of my childhood, living at my grandparents’ home for years, to the countless weekends worked at the family restaurant since the age of 12, thereby giving up any notion of a “normal” teenage existence, complete with Prom or movies or sleepovers, to trying my very hardest to be the hardworking, obedient-to-elders, smart and intelligent role model for all my younger cousins and sibling … all this has shaped me to be the person I am today.

I am a fierce survivor, with an intense independent spirit that will never bow down to others, ever again. Not even my own flesh and blood.

Tomorrow Is No Guarantee

For this is the time, when it all comes crashing down upon you, that you realize you can die at any moment.

Do you want to pass from this earth, filled with broken dreams never fulfilled, visions that never came true because you decided to put it off yet another day, yet another year?

Tomorrow is never a promise made to us. Next week is no guarantee.

So the chances are, your answer is no. If the answer is no, what are you doing about it?

You think it’s financial reasons that hold you back?

No. It is you that holds you back.

You think it’s familial obligations and responsibilities that hold you back?

No. It is you that holds you back.

You think it’s your job, your commitment to the company/organization you work for that holds you back?

No. It is you that holds you back.

You think it’s time that holds you back, that you seemingly just never can “find the time”?

No. It is you that holds you back.

Realize that if you can never “find the time,” time will never find you.

It Is Now. Or Never.

I urge you. Do not live a life with regrets. Do not. You will only forsake your own abundant talents, gifts, dreams, and ambitions.

And for what? A little money? A promised promotion every 4 years so long as you do your due diligence? A frantic and frenzied country binge you try and pack into your ridiculously short vacation time just so you can say you have had “experiences“? A T-shirt that say you went to the Taj Mahal? A meager 2% raise, hopefully, this year, pending how the company does at year end?

Or maybe it’s because it’s your parents who expect you to graduate and get a nice-paying-nice-sounding job with a respectable company. That means, they’ve raised a “good” daughter or son. One who conforms. Who doesn’t step outside the line. Who doesn’t cause trouble for anyone else, especially for the family.

What’s deeply troubling is ignoring the searing pains of your broken heart, realizing that you are not living the life you’ve imagined.

So pick up those pieces you’ve shattered on the ground. Breathe. Start putting them back together, piece by piece.

People will come by and laugh at you. Saying all the while, “What’s the use? What for? You’re wasting your time. You’ll never succeed. You’ll fail. Who do you think you are?”

Ignore them. Even if it’s from the very people who are supposed to support you, supposed to understand you. They may not.

And so you must keep on putting those pieces together. No matter how long it takes, put yourself back together. And never look back.

Go. Now. Your life depends upon this decision.

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