评论
打印
When it comes to deciding what to do with our lives, we are frequently presented with what looks like a very painful choice: the passionate path vs the safe path.
当我们决定人生做什么的时候，我们经常面临一个看起来非常痛苦的选择:是充满激情的道路还是安全的道路。
The latter involves the slow mastery of a dependable profession; we will be bored - but we know we’ll never be fired.
后者需要慢慢精通一种可靠的职业; 我们可能会感到无聊——但我们知道我们永远不会被解雇。
Meanwhile, the former is a high-wire act in which we fantasise generating an income from what we deeply love and yet we constantly fear penury and humiliation.
与此同时，前者像是一种走钢丝行为，在这种冒险行为中，我们幻想从自己深爱的事物中获得收入，然而我们总是害怕贫穷和受到羞辱。
The choice can feel acute, but it may be less so than it seems, once we properly explore the concept of safety.
选择可能会让人感觉很尖锐，但一旦我们正确地认识到了安全的概念，这可能看起来没有那么尖锐。
We are never properly safe so long as we are doing something we hate or are pursuing out of cowardice.
只要我们在做我们讨厌的事情，或者出于怯懦而追求的事情，我们就永远不会感到真正安全。
In the deeply competitive conditions of modernity, our back-up career - the one we adopt out of fear - will be someone else’s central ambition;
在现代竞争激烈的环境下，我们的备选职业——我们出于恐惧而从事的职业——将成为他人的核心抱负;
our plan B will be someone else’s plan A, which places us at an immediate disadvantage in terms of the energy and focus we are able to muster.
我们的B计划将成为他人的A计划，这将使我们在精力和注意力方面处于不利地位。
The ‘safe’ choice might ruin us.
“安全”的选择可能会毁了我们。
By contrast, what we love is what we are obsessed by anyway, we’d do it for free - which decisively increases our chances of mastery while reducing the price of failure.
相反，我们喜欢的是我们所痴迷的，我们会不求报酬去做这件事——这无疑增加了我们精通的机会，同时降低了失败的代价。
A decade of mixed results on a passion-project is inherently less onerous than unspectacular returns for a whole career in a hateful field.
在一个充满激情但前途未卜的项目上工作十年，比在一个令人厌恶的领域里工作整整十年，获得平淡无奇的回报，要轻松得多。
It is in the end not very safe to use the one life we have forcing ourselves to do what we know from the outset we won’t enjoy - simply in order to keep living.
仅仅为了活下去，用我们仅有的生命强迫自己去做我们从一开始就知道不会喜欢的事情，这最终是不太安全的。
This isn’t safety; it’s masochism.
这不是安全; 这是找罪受。
We may all have to spend our first two decades suffering through the education system;
我们可能都要在前20年里忍受教育系统的折磨;
but at some point, we are allowed to leave school;
在某一时刻，我们被允许离开学校;
at some point, we need to have a shot at answering what life could be about beyond obedience and timidity.
在某一时刻，我们需要尝试回答，除了顺从和胆怯，生活会是什么样子。
It is not very common to have a passion; most of us don’t.
选择激情并不常见; 我们大多数人都不会选择激情。
Yet if we are blessed enough to have one, we are risking far more than we should by failing to heed its call.
然而，如果我们有幸选择这条道路，我们会因没有听从它的召唤，所冒的风险远远超过了我们应该冒的风险。
