What sets your heart ablaze?
Discovering your true passion and the courage to pursue it, regardless of what others expect.
Follow Whatever Sets Your Heart Ablaze
If I could tell young women entering my field only one thing, it would have very little to do with accounting.
It wouldn’t be which certifications to pursue, which skills to master, or how quickly to climb the ladder.
I would tell them this:
Please, follow whatever sets your heart ablaze.
Not what looks impressive on paper. Not what someone else tells you that you would be good at. Not simply what promises the safest future or the highest salary.
Find the thing that makes something inside you come alive, and then be brave enough to follow it.
Because eventually, the titles become familiar. The promotions become jobs. The accomplishments you once dreamed about become lines on a résumé. And when all of that settles, you are left with the quiet reality of how you spend your days.
I want you to love those days.
I want you to find work worthy of your passion.
There is something almost sacred about discovering the thing you can pour yourself into—not because someone is watching and not because there is a reward waiting on the other side, but because you genuinely care about the work itself.
For me, strangely enough, I found that in accounting.
But not really in the numbers.
I found it in the questions hiding behind them.
I found it in the moment something didn’t quite reconcile and I needed to know why. In tracing a transaction backward until I understood the story it was telling. In discovering an error and knowing that correcting it mattered, even when no one else would have noticed.
I found it in understanding that accounting isn’t only about recording what happened.
Sometimes, it is about having the courage to ask why it happened at all.
That sets something in me on fire.
And I have come to believe that everyone deserves to know what that feeling is like.
I don’t mean that every day at work should feel inspiring. Passion doesn’t make frustration disappear. It doesn’t eliminate exhaustion, difficult people, tedious assignments, mistakes, disappointment, or days when you would rather be anywhere else.
Loving something does not make it easy.
Sometimes it makes it harder.
Because when you care deeply about your work, you feel its disappointments more deeply, too. You notice what could be better. You wrestle with problems other people might comfortably ignore. You carry ideas home with you because your mind refuses to leave them unfinished.
Passion has a cost.
But so does indifference.
And if I am going to spend thousands upon thousands of hours of this very finite life working, learning, failing, growing, questioning, and beginning again, I would rather spend them caring too much than feeling nothing at all.
I think young women are sometimes encouraged to build their lives backward.
Choose something sensible.
Choose something secure.
Choose something you are good at.
Then learn to love it.
I hope you consider doing the opposite.
Pay attention to what you already love.
Notice what makes you curious. Notice the problems you cannot resist trying to solve. Notice the subjects you accidentally spend hours reading about. Notice what makes you angry enough to want to change something and what makes you excited enough that you cannot stop talking about it.
Those things are telling you something.
Listen.
You may discover that what sets your heart ablaze isn’t glamorous.
Mine certainly isn’t supposed to be.
Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped caring whether anyone else understood why I loved the work I had chosen.
I understood.
And perhaps that is enough.
Because there will come a point when no title, salary, applause, credential, or carefully constructed definition of success can answer the most important question for you:
Did I spend my life doing something that mattered to me?
I want my answer to be yes.
Not because every moment was extraordinary.
But because I was there for it.
Fully.
Curious. Frustrated. Determined. Occasionally exhausted. Sometimes a little obsessed.
But alive.
So, to the young woman standing at the beginning of her career, trying to decide which direction her life should take:
You do not have to choose the path that makes the most sense to everyone else.
Find the work that makes you want to know more.
Find the problems you want to spend your life solving.
Find the thing worthy of everything you have to give.
And then give it everything.
Because one day, the titles will become familiar.
The promotions will become jobs.
The credentials will become letters after your name.
And the applause, however wonderful, will eventually grow quiet.
You will still have to wake up in the morning and live the life you built.
Build one that makes you want to get up.
Follow whatever sets your heart ablaze.
At the end of all of this, I think that’s what we’re left with.
Not whether we chose perfectly.
Not whether we became the most successful person in the room.
Not even whether everything we gave our hearts to worked out the way we hoped.
But whether we can look at the life we gave our years to and say:
Yes.
This was worthy of my fire.
