I’m on the train back from Boston, where I was in town for my 5 year reunion at Harvard Business School. I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for months knowing that I would like to make a career transition and hoping to find some inspiration from my classmates and the discussions with professors this weekend.

I want to share one talk that particularly stood out to me this weekend — it was called “Living an extraordinary life” by Stever Robbins, a career coach. You can listen to the 50-minute talk here.

Stever suggests that in order to live an extraordinary life you must focus on activities you love, people you want to work with, things you want to learn, doing what motivates you to get out of bed every day. Most people view risk-taking as a financial decision: the key trade-off being between a steady/secure corporate job (the “less-risky” option) versus a job that is motivated by interest/passion with potentially less certainty in the financial rewards (the “higher risk” option). Stever suggests that taking a secure corporate job is actually the riskier option because you are uncertain whether you will be passionate about the work, people, hours, etc.