If you quit your day job to become a DJ, spent five years doing it, and then came back to more traditional full-time employment, did you fail at being a DJ?
Heck no! Things aren’t successful or not based on how long they last. I had a successful career in sales; I can say that despite the fact that I no longer work in sales. It was successful in that it served my life during the stage of my life where I needed exactly what it provided, and in that it taught me many skills that made the transition to the next stage of my career just as successful.
Once upon a time, I also had a successful career as a stable hand. I can tell you that zero horses died under my care! I also have a ton of great stories from that time and learned many valuable lessons. I’m not a “failed stable hand.”
Your life is going to look very different across its whole span. Its wild to think that shifting your career to suit those changes counts as “failing” at something. I consider it way more of a failure to dogmatically stick to something that’s no longer serving you just for the sake of doing so. Maybe being a DJ ruled when you were single in your 20s and then you swapped back to full-time employment (with benefits) once you got married and had kids. That’s about the story of my sales career, so it makes sense to me. It also makes perfect sense to me to swap to being a DJ in your 40s (or 50s, or 60s…) because you’ve done enough full-time employment work to get what you needed out of it and now you want something that energizes different parts of your brain. The point is, there’s no wrong answer here.
If your life is being served, that’s success.
The Opportunity Machine 