If I wonder whether I followed my dreams, and the answer is “yes” - it must have been a fever dream!
I started work in the 1960s, as a physicist at the Port Kembla Steelworks and immediately joined the Steel Industries Auto Club, to race rally cars on deserted back roads.
I loved the rally cars but not the steelworks culture, so I left. I headed off on a tangent to New Guinea where I worked as a tutor with a side interest in filmmaking with research into hair and wool. This research later helped me win an Ig Nobel prize for “groundbreaking” research on belly button fluff and why it was almost always blue! Who would have thought!
I left New Guinea after a bit – feeling I had kind of “failed” again.
But come the 1970s, I entered my 'drug-crazed hippie years', making my living as a long-haired, dope-smoking taxi driver who dreamt of being a filmmaker! I had a ball – and had sideline gigs as a roadie, an apprentice car mechanic and electronics fiend.
From this motley bunch of parallel lives, I somehow fell into a scientific officer role in a cardiac lab. Part of my job was to film the flow of blood through the coronary arteries and – guess what? – my earlier experience of building a film processing laboratory to make movies for MTV was crucial!
Once more I “dropped out” of work – this time to study Biomedical Engineering. Along the way I bumped into the fabulous wild card Fred Hollows, and for him I designed and built a machine to detect electrical signals from the human retina.
Finally, after completing my Masters, I had three separate offers to do a PhD. But instead, I started again as a medical student.
I’ve applied (and “failed”) to be a NASA astronaut, which fuelled my move into live-broadcasting the space shuttle launch on Triple J. From that early break my media career blasted off, in radio, TV, writing 48 books, speaking, podcasts and the internet.
I’ve worked as a medical doctor and as a 4WD test-driver, a TV weatherman, a labourer and in many more jobs.
In total, I’ve had 16 years of university education – essentially for free. (Back then, the Australian governments saw Education as a Worthy Investment in the Future! That was another beautiful dream.)
Being told to “follow your dreams” is totally useless if you don’t know where to begin! You might start off loving astronomy, but then fall in love with 17th-century Mongolian literature before shifting up a gear to become a plumber (without plumbing, there is no civilisation!).
And you need some degree of practicality – or at least enough money to live on. In 2024, the economic gap between the poor and the wealthy in the USA has never been greater. To make the world a fairer place would be a noble dream!
For most of my life, I have been gloriously impractical with a dozen or more life changes. I never made a long-term plan. I never considered metaphorically sitting on top of the ‘tall building’, seeing all the roads and picking the best path.
Instead, I made lots of short-term goals and plans. I don’t think of myself as a dreamer. I think of myself as someone with fanciful plans who focuses intently. Somehow by accident I’ve ended up where I am now – in my dream job. So maybe I sell myself short and really I have darn gone followed my dreams!
The message from my story is that you don't have to know all the answers; the dream is wanting to keep learning!
You can read about these stories and many more in my book A Periodic Tale – My Sciencey Memoir.
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