does anyone else’s family think their ambitions/goals are “stupid”?
i’m constantly told to give up on my goals. they’re not even unrealistic, i don’t want to be a big, giant unicorn who saves the world or something.
Give us some examples? What goals are you being asked to give up on?
learning how to make videogames, learning to program a site, drawing, etc.
Follow your passion, but also be practical. For example art was my passion, but I realized at Uni that I wasn't going to make a living at it so went into trades/engineering. I also enjoyed the C64 programming.
But now I get to use my keen art eye for building some neat 3d CAD renderings and sharp looking PowerPoint's for corporate presentations. And I'm not a real coder, but the basic functions I can build into our CAD software to automate design work and configurations, based on designer value entries.
Just keep learning new things and decide which things you want to continue to chase. Some things are easier than others, but people do these things and also started at a point where they might have known nothing. It's about how much effort you are willing to put in to gain these skills.
Of course you gotta do stuff to pay the bills now, but don't let people destroy your ambitions for the future.
If they make you feel happy, don't listen to them. You may even get good enough to a point where you could make a decent living out of it, if not then you still learned something that could end up being useful when combined with something else.
You can learn those things any time. Do you mean your goal is for your income to be from games/webdesign/art? In that case you can always join a company. If you mean you want to independently create and sell your works it's going to be very tough. You're essentially starting your own business and most business startups fail.
I was going to ask the same.
Those goals are not even that "out there", but to play the devil's advocate here for a moment.
Is it because your family know you, and you tend to flit from one "big idea" to the next, and they are worried about you putting in a lot of time and effort, to then get bored and move on to the next one. Or perhaps you have always been an outdoors kinda person, the idea of you sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, just is way out of your "normal".
I'm not saying they are correct, but if they genuinely care about you, maybe ask why they think it is a bad idea.
In saying that, maybe they are just cunts.
There are so many variables, like an you just out of school or university, are you mid career on your 40's and looking for a change, are you recently retired and have always held an interest.....