“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

We finally begin to hit our stride when we ignore the expectations of the well-intentioned and follow our own path. For some of us it comes well after our formal education and those earnest early career moves. Momentum isn’t leaping off the cliff, it’s picking up pieces of our identity and adding them on, one after the other, like a snowball rolling down a mountain of fresh, sticky snow. Soon there’s no stopping us.

The thing is, that momentum applies as much to the wrong slopes as it does the right one. Once we start rolling and picking up habits, stopping becomes very challenging indeed, let alone nudging ourselves over to another slope. We don’t always know which slope is our slope, but we often know which one is not for us. And we know we can’t wait forever to decide: we must eventually roll.

Some snowballs appear as oddballs. So what? Does the world need yet another compliant commuter making their way to a job they hate? Who want to go through life wedged into a box like that? Find a place where it’s okay to roll the way you want to roll. That which makes us peculiar also makes us unique, and there’s always an audience for someone unique. What is more virtuous than a life spent growing into the purpose we were meant for?