Will I miss these four-day weekends?

Compared to what? Everyday being a weekend?

I got to admit, unlike a typical civilian job, although my work hours prove (I believe) much less predictable, I do get plenty of days off.

I also get plenty of benefits (medical, dental, educational, housing… from the federal government, state governments, and even municipalities), a chance to rotate to a new part of the world every couple of years, and a reasonably generous retirement pension.

I only have three years until the minimum 20 to retire under the old plan. With the new plan, the military goes from a defined-benefit plan to a defined-contribution plan.

Of course if I could have hit my entrepreneurial stride in my early 20s and knew how, then I probably would’ve chosen that.

No point dwelling on it now. I’m thankful my life turned out as it did.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert in his TED talk calls it synthetic happiness, as opposed to natural happiness.

Natural happiness results from getting what you want. Synthetic happiness results from making what you want, often after you don’t get what initially wanted.

In the talk he asks, if presented the choice between winning a lottery of over $100M or losing more than one limb, which would you choose? It’s a bit of a no-brainer. I think none of us would choose the latter.

Yet, research reveals that within one year, both groups report equal amounts of happiness.

I finally watched “Field of Dreams” (1989) last week. I rented it via Amazon Prime after listening to Tony Robbins describe the movie in a home-study course titled, “Ultimate Edge.”

In entrepreneurial discussion circles, the movie gets alluded to usually with a negative connotation, repeating a line that I don’t remember hearing the movie, “If you build it, they will come.” The contention goes that production doesn’t imply distribution, that building something doesn’t mean people want it; do your market research.

In the movie, it was, “If you build it, he will come.”

The movie contains several interweaving plots, leaving to interpretation whether the field of dreams and “he” primarily refers to Shoeless Joe (Ray Liotta), to Archie “Doc” Graham, to Ray’s (Kevin Costner’s) father or maybe even to Terence Mann (James Earl Jones).

Tony Robbins uses Doc Graham’s plot to highlight what it means to lose one’s dream, but achieve one’s destiny.