I can't help but be inspired by those people who have this sense of enlivening resilience and determination about them to do anything and everything they set their mind to.
Just today I met this very unique man: a charmer, an entrepreneur, MD, JD, (insert any other occupation/credential you can think of). Post med-school/residency, and after over a decade ingrained in the healthcare field, he decided to enroll himself into law school...thrice. Needless to say, after both med-school and his third and last attempt at law school, this doctor was knee-deep in debt with an MD and JD-in-hand. This man became both a practicing healthcare physician and attorney and sits as chairman at a top-tiered hierarchy of everything healthcare-law related here in Los Angeles.
While I do believe one's degrees or credentials isn't necessarily a predicate or defining measure of one's worth or intellectual prowess, I do always appreciate people who take another stab at the wonderful world of academia-- whether it is to further one's career or to lessen-the-unfortunate-blow of one's own intellectual shortcomings, I always appreciate a head-strong, determined academic. Financially, mentally, and physically speaking, it takes a toll just to get a single degree. Clearly this doctor's path was not so easy.
When I asked this doctor which practice he preferred, he said he enjoyed being a physician far more than, well, pushing papers (fine..I may or may not have misconstrued what he said about what it *really* means to be a practicing attorney ;) ).
When I asked this doctor what made him decide to pursue two very different and challenging careers, I thought he'd say something along the lines of how it was his deep-seated childhood dream to become a money-making, power-house hot-shot, dotting "i's".. crossing "t's"... and saving lives. I then took another moment to realize that this thought-process was likely a manifestation of all of my deepest and darkest desires. Lol what?
His answer: "I did not know what to choose, I couldn't decide, so I chose both."
While some of you (and by "some" I mean my sum total one Facebook reader: hi mom) may think the moral of this very long-winded story is that you can do anything you set your mind to or that some other relevant cliche applies here...
I'd say the true moral of the story is: being indecisive isn't so bad. =]
