What if money was no object?

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?
Let’s suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and 
say, well, we’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to 
do. So I always ask the question, what would you like to do if money were no object? 
How would you really enjoy spending your life?
Well, it’s so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students 
say well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as 
everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I’d 
like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding 
school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?
When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, 
I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the 
money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your 
time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on 
doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full 
of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you 
can eventually turn it – you could eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to 
become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a 
good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. That’s everybody is – somebody is 
interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will. But 
it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like, in order to go on 
spending things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to 
follow in the same track.
See what we are doing, is we’re bringing up children and educating to live the same sort 
of lives we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in 
life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it’s 
all retch, and no vomit it never gets there. And so, therefore, it’s so important to 
consider this question,
What do I desire?


[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DenamyrElHM]
Alan Watts