So why do so many of us perceive ourselves as being so terribly misaligned with our right work? Upbringing can have something to do with it. A client once confessed: “My father told me I had three career options. I could be a doctor, an engineer or a failure.”

Image Credit... Sean Kelly

I imagine that when the Grammy-winning singer John Legend broke the news that he wanted to quit his job as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group to pursue music full time, some of his relatives were concerned about his career stability.

Obviously, he made the right choice. Many stories don’t turn out that way.

I have received pained e-mail messages from grown offspring of aspiring entrepreneurs who chucked it all to follow one failed venture after another. A musician with a stable day job told me that after pursuing music seriously on the side, he wasn’t so sure that he could take the lifestyle full time.

What separates crazy dreams from viable business ideas? I don’t think that it has anything to do with the idea, or the profession, or the market itself. It has to do with the person.

Jonathan Fields, a high-powered Wall Street lawyer, quit that job more than a decade ago to do personal training sessions in Central Park for $15 an hour. But then he turned his passion into one of the most profitable fitness centers in New York. He went on to start a flourishing yoga studio, which he sold after getting a deal from a major publishing house to write a career guide.

Real creative urges, those we are meant to express, don’t go away. If ignored, they bother us, affect our health, fester and eventually turn us into the living dead.