You Want to Try a Different Profession. How Do You Know Whether to Go for It?

AVAlexander Volchek

I was asked this question: suppose someone has a profession, a life that has more or less taken shape, and suddenly becomes interested in doing something completely different. But it seems unreasonable; it seems they should be doing something else right now, something with better prospects. Or even staying in their current profession. What should someone do in that situation? Is it worth trying something new, even if it seems illogical, unstructured? How should you relate to money, your profession, and other people’s expectations? And what do you need to see in yourself before taking the next step? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

The first thing a person needs to do is understand and see their own life, and move forward in terms of the causes and consequences in that life, rather than their own wants. When someone sees that they want to try something, that’s exactly the point: they want to try it. They want to follow their own wants. And unfortunately, those wants often contain not freedom but the machinery of the ego, or a violation of a law of the universe. Or someone wants to resist certain things, and in fact their own damage is driving them; they are acting on the basis of their own damage. So if we look at this question in depth, of course a person needs to work on expanding their perception. That can only be done through spiritual knowledge, spiritual science, and learning to perceive how the world works. Everything else, to be honest, is an illusion.

Whatever I might tell you now about how to do this or that, it’s an illusion. Of course I give a lot of advice, both on the AI and tech channel and here. I talk about a great many things on this channel and offer all kinds of advice about what someone could do to make sound decisions. But lives are very different, Olya. One woman needs to wait and not get married, while another needs to get married. This family needs to have children, while that family needs to wait. Here someone needs to start working right after school; here they need to work while they’re still in school; and here they shouldn’t work at all for the next five years. Regardless of social status, and based instead on the energies that are moving, so that you can have certain forces within you and develop harmoniously in relation to the world. That is the only way.

Everything else, of course, is highly individual. Every individual case needs to be considered differently. That is the only way. Everything else is just hype. All right, let’s go along with the hype. Nobody is stopping you from studying something, testing things out, exploring on the side. The question is how you relate to it. I took up piano about two years ago, I think. Yes, it’s been two years since I started learning. I set myself some sort of goal. Someone will just say, ‘Oh, it’s a hobby, it’s nothing serious.’ But I don’t know: perhaps ten years from now I’ll be studying at a conservatory or giving concerts. I don’t know. Or perhaps it will end and have nothing at all to do with my life. Perhaps I’ll have programs for developing musical talent, or spaces connected with music. Or perhaps none of that will happen.

Perhaps I’ll be digging the earth somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. This is about how you relate to what you do, how much you understand the importance of a particular task you’re doing. What matters more to you: will you take the job that pays $500 more, the job that is strategically right, or the job that develops you as a person? That’s all. Or perhaps you won’t work at all, because that is the right path for you at this point. Ha-ha-ha! It isn’t easy. What does it mean to try a particular profession? Go ahead and try it; nobody is stopping you. That’s the whole point, Olya: nobody is forbidding anyone to do anything.

Do what you want. Want to sleep more? Sleep more. Want to sleep less? Sleep less. Nobody is stopping you. Someone will say, ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s impossible for me. If only you knew how I live.’ Nobody is forbidding you to do it. Do what you want. If you want to live on the street, do what you want. Within what your country and the laws where you live allow, of course. Unfortunately, we live in a world with different laws, so I can’t interpret them for you. But within the laws of your country, that is the only restriction there is. And if you don’t even like those laws, well, people do this too. They say, ‘I don’t like this law.’ They go ahead and break it and end up in prison, for example, or move to another country. The laws are different. In today’s world, countries have laws that contradict each other completely; in many countries they are radically opposed.

Just as skin colors are completely different, just as men and women differ in a huge number of ways. You have a choice. Olya, you can choose to get a cat tomorrow, a dog, a snake, a perch in your apartment, whatever you want. You’ll say, ‘The perch will die in two days.’ Well, it will die. But you have a choice; you have that option. You have the option of moving to the countryside. You have options; you can do what you want. You can choose not to work; you can work a great deal. My sister recently said she would really like to do some kind of simple work. She called it simple, but she absolutely didn’t mean easy work. She meant something very hands-on, like working in a shop making bouquets, making flower arrangements for people, or working in a coffee shop.

I told her, ‘Then get a job in a coffee shop on Saturdays.’ You want to make cakes? Go into a place, I don’t know, visit fifteen coffee shops and offer to bake cakes for them for free. You simply want to do it. Or do it for a little money. And just do it. Show up and do it. You don’t need to turn it into a business; you don’t need to think about customers. You just go and work with your hands. Do you want to? Then go ahead and do it. What’s the problem? Why wait if you want to do it? You have the opportunity; you can easily set aside time for it and go and do it. What’s wrong with that? Honestly, if I wanted to work in a coffee shop, I would go and work in a coffee shop. I don’t see any problem with it. And not for hype or for Instagram. You know perfectly well, by the way, that there’s a great deal I don’t post on social media.

Not because I’m hiding it, but because that’s how the content comes about naturally, and people in different places see part of my content, part of my life. I’m not trying to glorify it, show it off excessively, or build some aspect of my development around it. Even my team can’t manage to do that. They can’t even manage to show my garden. I planted 150 bulbs the day before yesterday, and they can’t even manage to cover that. They can’t keep up, because for me it’s simply: I did something, filmed it, and moved on. Because I did it for myself. Yesterday it was already getting dark, and I was standing there cleaning the pool, taking leaves out. My wife came home. I said, ‘Polina, look at the outdoor flowerpot I bought, a different color, a wooden one. Here it’s light oak, and here it’s dark.

I’ll put it down below so it doesn’t clash. I’ll plant twenty-five bulbs in it.’ She looks at me and says, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I say, ‘Ah, right, you’re not interested.’ She really isn’t interested in which pot I’m going to plant tulips in. When twenty-five tulips grow in one small pot like that, in a big bunch, of course she’ll say, ‘Oh, cool, that’s beautiful. Can I cut some?’ She’ll ask that, a hundred percent. And I’ll say, ‘Go to the store and buy yourself some tulips.’ Want to do it? Do it. Want to plant a thousand? Plant a thousand. It’s your choice, Olya. If you really want to understand this and do it, that is your choice. You have that opportunity. I’d like to do that with music. I have two teachers. I recently said I’d like to make an agreement with myself and practice four hours a day for about three months.

And of course, to them I’m an unusual sort of person. And it’s my choice. Could I practice four hours a day, every day, right now? Probably. Someone will say, ‘You can afford to.’ Everyone can afford to. Sleep less, spend less time on social media, eat less, work less, get a different job. What do you think, that I just freed up four hours and that was it? It’s my choice whether to do it. My choice. And then laziness comes into it, a lack of energy, feeling unable because of social fears or certain circumstances, not knowing whether it really needs to be done, and so on. Right? And so on. Certain limitations. It would be easier for me if my teachers lived in my city, rather than working remotely, online.

If they lived in my city, it would be easier for me. For some things, I sometimes need someone to keep me on track, and for other things I don’t. Some things you do automatically, without anyone supervising you and without other people at all, and for some reason they actually get done. Other things don’t. It’s a choice, folks. We have a dog. He wanders around here from time to time; perhaps you’ve seen him on camera. How old is he? A year and a half, and practically nobody walks him except me and one of my daughters. Luckily, we have a lot of land, so he runs around here. And borzois in general tend to sleep all day. They sleep 98 percent of the time. The dog is always asleep.

Why do the children walk him, or not walk him? Someone will say they weren’t taught, nobody followed up. That isn’t even it. It really isn’t. Why did my son go outside today and spend fifteen or twenty minutes practicing his basketball dribbling? Because he felt like doing it. He felt like doing it. Another one sat there whining that we’d given him the wrong food in the morning, because that’s what he wanted to do. It’s his choice. It’s no different for an adult. We think an adult does or doesn’t need to be trained to walk the dog. But adults are the same: my wife didn’t walk the dog before, and she still doesn’t. I tell everybody, but nobody walks him. They look at me, say, ‘Mm, yes,’ and go on not walking him.

But I’m not exactly someone who walks an enormous amount myself, someone who spends all day walking. I just have friends with dogs who spend several hours walking every day, three whole hours. It’s a big part of their lives, but not of mine. Not for me. Do I have the opportunity? Of course I do. I have endless hikes and trails here, whatever you want. Right over there, through the window. I can get in the car, drive a little way, and walk around town or somewhere else. It’s a choice, folks. So, Olya, the main answer to your question about a profession is this: don’t deceive yourself. Keep watching the videos on my three channels. I think those three channels offer a very powerful, very powerful opportunity to understand where you live, the setting in which your life unfolds.

If you can stick with it for at least a year, at least a year, stick with watching the three channels for at least a year, it will give you a very powerful opportunity to perceive reality more broadly. That doesn’t mean I’m the most correct, or the one who is right, or anything like that. Just stick with that amount of video for a year. Right now I put out, I don’t know, six to eight videos a week. Call it a video a day. Watch three hundred videos over a year. Then some area of new perception, some new consciousness, will begin to take shape. And that, too, is your choice: what to watch and what to do.