“What do you want to do with your life?”
I was hanging out with this girl. I can’t even remember her name. Her name isn’t important. I was in my mid 20′s and still living in Brooklyn. I had just asked this girl whose name I can’t remember that question. This was her answer:
“Well you know, before I die I really want to go to Switzerland. That’s like my big life goal. I want to go out there and see all the historic landmarks and just sight-see”
I said:
“Nice”
Then I sat back and thought about what she had just said. Let me explain what you’d have to do to accomplish that goal:
You’d have to get a passport. A passport costs like 50 bucks. It takes, at most, a couple months to get one (that is, assuming you’re an American, which she was). Even if you have to get one overnight (which I once had to do, that’s another story) it’s, I think, 300 bucks.
Okay next you need some information on what to do when you’re in there. You have two options, you could go to Barnes & Noble and sit around and read all the books about Switzerland (free) and maybe even buy one (<$30). Or you could go on Google, type in “Switzerland” and probably figure out all the info you’ll need in 20 minutes.
Next you need a plane ticket. A plane ticket costs less than $1000 to most foreign countries. If you were lucky you might be able to get one for closer to $500. I just did a quick search on Kayak for tickets one month from now and the lowest fares were right around $800 so we’ll roll with that.
Next you need a hotel reservation. Sure as a BMXer my first instinct would be to go on Facebook and find some dudes who wanted to ride and would let me stay with them for free, but she’s some girl who doesn’t know anyone in Switzerland so she should get a hotel. I’ve never been to Switzerland but pretty much everywhere I’ve been in the world, I’ve never had to spend more than $50 dollars a night for a hotel room (I have spent more, I just didn’t have to). A week at $50 a night is $350.
Okay and then you need a week off from work. Any job, on Earth, will let you take a week off for work once in a while and if you have a decent job, they will probably even pay you while you take this week off.
So add all those together (the books, the plane ticket, the hotels) and you have:
$1200.
Her life goal costs $1200.
Even if you were working for minimum wage, that’s a month’s pay if you’re working 40 hours a week. She actually had a half decent job, she might have been making $40k a year I’d guess. In which case it was only a couple week’s pay.
Her life goal could be accomplished by just going to work and not spending any money for a couple weeks.
Okay so the next day I had lunch with Harrison Boyce. He runs Defgrip, does a lot of the design stuff for Macneil, etc. It was him and his brother, Hamilton actually. They design and build websites together part time, including, at one time, The Come Up. We met at an outdoor diner in Union Square. We hadn’t seen each other in a while but it was cool seeing them and catching up on what they were doing, they asked me a lot of questions about how TCU was doing, what it was like riding in Brooklyn, stuff like that. Harrison had a bunch of cool stuff going on, he was about to move to Brooklyn with his wife, he had gotten a bunch of new design jobs outside the BMX industry that he was excited about, etc. We ate, paid, shook hands and went our separate ways.
As I was walking away from the diner I had a realization: my parent’s were right. They had always told me “you are the company you keep”, but I never really paid much attention. My parents would say that shit because they wanted me to quit hanging out with certain people in high school. If one of my friends was getting suspended, smoking weed and fighting all the time, they’d tell me not to hang out with him (not that I ever listened, but they’d try). It finally hit me as I walked away from that diner that it worked the other way too.
Here I was spending hours of my valuable time hanging out with a girl who’s life goal was to go to fucking Switzerland, when I could be spending time with people like Harrison who was doing something with his life. The fact that I was spending my time with someone with such a small idea of what was possible on earth was rubbing off on me. I was thinking small. If I was going to keep company, it needed to be people who were doing more than I was doing. I needed to start spending time around people who inspired me and made me want to do better. To improve my situation. To expand my horizons. Not with this stupid girl who couldn’t scrounge up 1200 bucks and a week off from work.
