Episode 12: The inherent trade-off of adulthood

I remember right after graduating from college, I had one core friend backpacking throughout Asia and Europe for a while. We all have some version of this friend or this story; as I’ve gotten older, I’ve met probably 12-15 other people that did this. The flip side of the whole deal is that you all have friends who dive into work at 16, 18, 22, whatever … and start hustling and earning money. Those people maybe have less “fun” in their 20s, but theoretically the idea is they can have fun at different points with saved money and then later on. Unless you have a trust fund, the idea of just backpacking around Europe and Asia is probably not feasible.

I turned 39 a few weeks ago and broadly I’m OK with my experiences thus far, although I wish I had invested more in my career back in the day. Well, I worked at a place briefly in 2018 in the cybersecurity industry. I had to go to Kansas City for an orientation and I met Steven McFarland, who kinda has a similar “focused on career later than others may have” path. He’s a cool dude and now starting to make career moves, so I thought I’d have him on this podcast.

This is a shorter episode because we spent some time at the beginning catching up on the place we worked together, and a lot of that wouldn’t interest you, so I killed it. But the stuff about the trade-offs we make in early to mid adulthood is important for a lot of people, so I thought that was a good essence here. Let’s get to it.