Richard Russo's 2004 Commencement Speech

For the full text: http://www.colby.edu/news/detail/488/

...suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.
-Richard Russo

I don't want to wake up one day tenured to a life that happened - I want to make my life happen. To make the things that I want happen. But oh, sometimes it feels so far away, doesn't it?

Search out the kind of work that you would gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it. Don't expect this to happen overnight. It took me nearly twenty years to get people to pay me a living wage for my writing, which makes me, even at this juncture, one of the fortunate few. Your work should be something that satisfies, excites and rewards you, something that gives your life meaning and direction, that stays fresh and new and challenging, a task you'll never quite master, that will never be completed. It should be the kind of work that constantly humbles you, that never allows you to become smug—in short, work that sustains you instead of just paying your bills. While you search for this work, you'll need a job. For me that job was teaching, and it's a fine thing to be good at your job, as long as you don't confuse it with your work, which it's hard not to do.
-Richard Russo

I know, I know. I am obsessed with work quotes. But I can't help it, at this particular time in my life. I keep reading these quotes about doing what you love in the hopes that it will make me courageous enough to well, do it. I'm still working on it, obviously.

I have a job. But I'm still looking for my work. I wonder how many other people out there are in the same boat.

To working on the true passion of our lives and doing our own work.