"What do you want to do in life?"
"What do you want to be in life?"
and...
"How do you these connect?"
Loaded questions.
At this point in my life when I think about my desires, my dreams, my goals, I have to consider how they affect the well being of my children (so I guess it's kind of funny that I'm writing this on my eldest daughter's second birthday). Now with that in mind, answering, "what do you want to do in life", becomes an extremely difficult question to answer.
I guess what I would say is that, more than anything, I want to leave a legacy for my children. When speaking of things that aren't tangible, I want to leave them a legacy of love, compassion, pride, thoughtfulness, joy and thoroughness. But I also want to leave them with a tangible legacy. I want to leave them with something that I built and owned, something that they can continue on with. I would be lying if I said that those thoughts had little to do with finances, but more importantly, the legacy I want to leave is one of which they can fully understand our obligation, as people, to help others.
So I guess outside of leaving a legacy for my children, what I really want to do in life is help others. Whether it was growing up Samoan, which is a culture built on the foundation of family, helping each other and never leaving anybody behind, or coming to understand the struggle of illegal Mexican immigrants from my father, who was an illegal immigrant, my desire was always to find a way to help those that I cared about, blood relatives or not. As I grew older and became aware of the injustices many people face, that desire grew to being able to help anybody that needed it. I think about the things in life that have given me the most joy, outside of moments with my family, and many of them have to do with helping another person. It's a fulfilling feeling.
It's a gift and a curse though, I feel. It's a gift in the sense that their excitement, their happiness, if even for just a moment, was a result of your action but it's a curse in that you begin to bear the burden of other people when you so desperately want to help. I've had many sleepless nights thinking of people I could have, should have but probably didn't help.
When it comes to helping others, it's also about being able to provide an opportunity to the talented people that I have around me, an opportunity for them to see their talents flourish and, I guess, be able to monetize their talents so that they can sustain a life built off of their own talent. I've always been extremely thankful for anybody who took the chance to see what I had to offer and then provided avenues for me to succeed, so in some way I feel like I owe that to people around me. I also hope to be able to create my own lane to thrive off of my own ideas, my own passion as well.
I guess when looking at it that way, I feel the like "what I want to do in life" also has to do with being able to have ownership of everything I create or develop. I don't want to have to work for another person for the rest of my life. But I feel like this is going somewhere else, so we'll come back to this...
So Sam, what do you want to be in life then?
I. WANT. TO. BE. REMEMBERED.
Ok, that too, but let's seriously answer that question.
I want to be a journalist. I want to be an educator. I want to be an activist.
I want to do all three and I want to work for myself. I want to have ownership and control over all of the creative ideas I am able to think of over my lifetime, however irrelevant some of those ideas may end up being.
Now why all three? Well, I want to write. I want to talk to people. I want to create genuine relationships with individuals. I want to help people. I want to teach people. I want to be taught. I want to spread awareness. I want to be made aware. I want to make a career out of all these things.
Now, how do we connect these two?
Well I guess it goes back to wanting to have ownership over my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams and also maintaining creative control over these three while also creating opportunities for others to do so. I mean, yes, I can always get a degree in journalism and get a job writing for somebody else OR I can get a job teaching something somebody else wants me to teach OR get a job spreading awareness about something somebody else wants me to spread awareness about, and I'm not trying to criticize anybody who does any of these things, but I want OWNERSHIP and CONTROL.
How do you retain ownership and control in this era? I believe you have to create a product, you have to brand it, and you have to put in the footwork for that product and the brand to succeed, every step of the way.
That leads to the magazine right? Well, kind of, sort of. I don't have all the knowledge in the world to make my dreams happen right now, but I feel like that magazine is a step in the right direction. I want to help people through my writing while also creating a product and a brand. Now I just have to figure out how to make it happen.
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