Life is not about stability, it’s about chance.

It’s about love, learning, mistakes, falling then picking ourselves back up. It’s about laughing at those mistakes when we’re older. We can rationalise this in our off time, but when it comes to our career choices we have a tendency to think traditional choices for stability’s sake. After all, we have responsibilities, families, and obligations. That’s understandable, and if you read my story you’ll know I can relate. Everyone that starts down an alternative path, whether it’s away from academia, away from industry, or away from what’s expected socially finds themselves confronting doubt and fear.

To make matters worse, every story is unique, every situation nuanced so that no one precisely has your fix-it-all solution to your woes. There is no snake oil for your specific scenario, but there are hundreds of thousands and more individuals with a similar story. They have similar fears, similar hopes, similar dreams that are just out of reach.

It’s crazy, but you can find time to do the things you want to do. You can live the life you want to lead without regret. But you have to take that chance. If you don’t, you’ll never know what you might have missed. The fears are founded in reality, but like all things in reality, you can control them to an extent.

For example, if you have bills to pay, but you really want to travel the world, you may see this at odds with each other. Unless your rich, that is. Instead, take a look at your finances and give up something. (I have a healthier diet thanks to swapping three lunches out for bagged lunches, saving myself over $15 a week.) Keep going until you’ve got yourself down to saving what you want while sacrificing a few first world comforts. Before you know it, your sacrifices will add up to a plane ticket.

Look at what others have been doing to see if you copy their success as well. Tom Morkes works from all over the world living financially cheaply while enjoying rich experiences. He isn’t a travel writer, he’s a specialist in Pay What You Want Pricing and helping people create their business. He’s not a millionaire by any stretch of the imagination, but he does work hard and live frugally in order to reap the benefits of this life in the here and now. He also makes money while out in the field to help support his current lifestyle of exploration, which is a secret that you could pick up and employ to make your dreams of following an alternative path become that much closer to reality.

Travelling an alt-path is hard to put down in front of you. It starts with having a dream, in the middle you discover that the beaten paths aren’t what you were looking for, and ends with either trying to will it to get better or actively making it better. Most people have the first two steps down pretty well, then they get to the third and they think that they are stuck with what is just there in front of them. However, if Scott Dinsmore has taught me anything, it’s that it’s up to you to make the change.

Change is difficult, though. You can do it with concrete planning, foresight, and the willpower to see it through no matter how many failures. The key is finding a great support group, mentors you can trust, resources at your fingertips, and — the most crucial element of all — the willingness to set your fears aside so you can dream while you’re awake. When you do all of this you go into each day with a solid goal in mind, the plan to make it real, and the resources to make it happen.

You can do this. You can follow an alt-path of your own making, no matter what stage of your life you are in.