This is an excerpt from a speech called "What If Money Was No Object" by Alan Watts. I came across it on Cheryl's new album, Only Human, where she used it as her Intro. It is truly inspirational, and I wanted to share it with you all because I feel like it's worth looking at. :)
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.
And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question:
What do I desire?
—Alan Watts
To listen to the speech on Cheryl's album, click the youtube link (or search it online).
To listen to the original speech, click the external link.
