Quote:
Originally Posted by Germanauto
Yeah exactly. I'm about 8 years out of undergrad but would've probably been a Bay Area millionaire and homeowner by now. But at that ripe age of 20 I was naive and thought being a Doctor = wealth. Did not realize the concept of opportunity cost at that time. Medicine is 7+ yrs of little to no income before the money arrives.
During the 2010s I was in school working for free, meanwhile big tech was a golden ticket.
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But you'll never know whether, from hindsight, entering the 'sliding door of opportunity' back then, would have brought you - in the long run - the presumably satisfactory life you enjoy right now. Maybe you would have ended up feeling unlucky or, who knows, already perished ? The grass ain't always greener on the other side - sometimes it's even fake.
A nice summer day back in the 80s. I was a teenager and a neighborhood friend came along with his car, inviting me to join him and his girlfriend to visit an event in a town nearby. It was tempting. I hesitated but declined as I had other plans for that summer afternoon. I remember how he tried to convince me to join + subsequently seeing him driving off into the distance. What I heard afterwards: he never made it to the other town. A few minutes after he left, while waiting in front of a traffic light, a car violently slammed into his car without braking (the other driver declared to be "fiddling with the radio, not noticing the car"). My friend recalled that he noticed in his rear view mirror that the other car was approaching without slowing down, and that, in a reflex, he quickly pushed down the head of his girlfriend who was sitting in the passenger seat, followed by a violent impact. The rear end of the car of my friend was badly crumpled. Troubling was particuliarly the sturdy panel (homemade wooden or metal plate) behind the back seats where my friend had fitted rear audio speakers: upon impact that plate/panel was brutally smashed forward against the rear side of the front seats, hurting the backs of both himself and his girlfriend (requiring medical help). Now, if I had been sitting on the backseat of my friend's car, my chances of survivaI would have been virtually zero (either I would have lost my head or the plate/panel would have at least broken my neck or my back). The reason that I can live to tell this sobering true story: life can move in mysterious ways - I was simply lucky that day not to have entered that tempting 'sliding door of opportunity'.