Last night, I came across a quote from Jim Carrey that really stuck with me. Yes, that Jim Carrey, the same one that gave us the ridiculous characters in movies such as Ace Ventura, The Mask, and my personal favorite, Dumb and Dumber. Anyway, he said:

My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that was possible for him. Instead he got a job as an accountant. When I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job. You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

Now there’s two parts of this full quote that I’d like to dissect.

Playing It Safe

First is the recognition of his father taking the safe route with his employment but ultimately getting canned. Now, there are obviously situations where ‘playing it safe’ makes sense. When you have a family to take care of, especially with young children involved, the ‘safe route’ is a more than acceptable decision.

But his father still getting fired from that “safe” job brings up a larger point: nobody, excluding your family, really cares about whether or not you succeed or fail. Human beings are selfish by nature. Time and time again we see that profits will be placed higher on the Totem Pole of Importance than people–and that’s the unfortunate nature of a capitalistic society. It obviously has its pros and cons.

And, sadly, we’re seeing similar happenings right now with the coronavirus pandemic. Unemployment numbers are skyrocketing, and many companies will take this time to ‘trim the fat’ from the organization. There will be a large number of people that won’t have an actual job to go back to.

Ironically, industries that have long been viewed as evil and money-hungry (i.e. casinos) are still fully paying their employees to this day while companies such as Kroger have eliminated the “hero pay” hourly bonus for their front line employees. And going back to the whole ‘humans are selfish’ note, it shouldn’t surprise you one bit that news just broke that Kroger’s executives receive bonuses based on the free cash flow of the business, which means they are in a significantly better position to receive that bonus by eliminating the “hero pay” bonus.

Take The Chance On What You Love Doing

In its purest form, the final line of Jim Carrey’s above quote is great, and is one of the most accurate representations of what we believe so passionately about here at Jellison Group Ohio. “You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.“

Warren Buffet got rich by zigging while others zagged. Why not do the same thing with your life?

This goes back to the piece I wrote a couple weeks ago titled, “Maybe We Needed This Pandemic To Happen.” Click here to read that if you haven’t already. Our worlds are shifting every day, with some people’s being turned completely upside down.

Why not take the chance? If it’s possible to fail at something you hate doing–like your current job you’re slaving away at–then why not try to achieve greatness doing something you love?

And really… is failing the worst thing that can happen to you? I’ll leave you to ponder that with this quick video from LJ: