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When I was young, I didn’t dream of a corporate career, working in business, at all.

My first dream was to be a farmer. I might have pursued that had I not kept being told it would be a hard life… much too hard for someone like me. Eventually, I was persuaded to discount it.

My next dream was to be a gardener. Or horticulturalist. Or landscape designer. However, I was told it wasn’t a proper career, and I wouldn’t be able to make ends meet, so I didn’t pursue that either.

Later on, I imagined being an architect would be the job for me. But I was reminded I was rubbish at maths. I think I put that dream away the day I was told I’d never make it.

By my mid-teens, I’d settled on being a graphic designer. Only, I hadn’t taken GCSE art, so was advised that was a non-starter. I couldn’t do an A-Level or HND in graphics without that prerequisite. I took design and technology instead, and became adept at MIG welding.

At eighteen, I found a college which would accept me onto a graphics course without any of those perquisites, but was told it wasn’t a proper university, and I needed a proper degree to make it in life. So there I had to delve into any other interest of mine.

I settled on international development, thinking working for an aid agency or NGO might be considered a proper career, enabling me to do some good in the world. However, by the end of my degree I’d read so many post-colonial critiques of development, that I concluded the field didn’t need yet another white middle-class male traipsing around as an expert.

From there I made a diversion towards publishing, thinking it a way to combine my love of graphics and writing with some sort of academic profession, aka a proper job. But after a few years temping and freelancing, that went nowhere at all, and I just ended up a general office dogsbody.

Years on, it might be said that I ended up in a field broadly reflective of some of those earlier ambitions of mine. Alhamdulilah for that. And perhaps I might be content in what I do, were I not surrounded by hyper-ambitious professionals, against whom I feel forced to measure myself.

But why not measure myself against my own ambitions instead? I wanted to be a farmer and, alhamdulilah, we find ourselves with a little homestead farm in Turkey. I wanted to be a gardener and, alhamdulilah, I have a garden of my own to tend. I wanted to be an architect and, alhamdulilah, I designed my own house, now built.

Indeed, alhamdulilah, by God’s great mercy, I find myself with a companion who shares my ambitions in life. If the Most Merciful wills, when we have discharged our duties, we will pursue those ambitions to live off our land, in that house we built together.

In these days suffocated and overwhelmed by the expectations of others, it’s good to remind myself what my own ambitions were. Why now worry that others are so far ahead of me in their careers, when that was never an ambition of mine in the first place? Why get despondent that I appear to have been left so far behind, when I was never pursuing that anyway?

Let me meditate instead on what I was pursuing, and how much of that dream has come alive. A better measure by which to measure myself. It’s time to rewire my mind.