Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

I’m 24 years old and feel nearly hopeless about my future. What can I do?

It’s never too late to turn your life around.

It might be difficult for you to see the road ahead. Sit down for a while, maybe with some friends or someone with counseling experience or even by yourself and consider the following:

1. What is a goal you think you would like to achieve?
2. Is your goal something specific and realistically achievable within say, the next 5 years? If not, try to scale it down a bit and go back to step 1.
3. What smaller steps can you start taking to progress towards that goal? Can you do any of those steps now?

You may find it difficult to either choose a specific or realistic goal because you don’t have enough information or there are too many uncertain things. In that case, just look for some smaller steps that maybe might kind of take you in the general direction you want to go and try it out for a while, and after some time sit down again and evaluate whether you want to keep going in that direction or try something else.

Regarding your interest in Japan, here are some suggestions (you’ll need to figure out which will work best for you)

1. Have you studied the language? Studying the language could lead you to jobs such as translation work. You might want to search for freelance translation work online
2. Have you looked into how much it would actually cost to take a trip to Japan? If you have the costs in mind then you can take some other unrelated job first and work towards saving money so you can travel there
3. You need to be open to taking on some work/jobs that may not be directly related to your goal, if only to start saving up money that you will need.

It is important too that even though you have a goal or area of interest, you also spend some time to try new things and widen your horizons, as this may unlock other areas of interest that may turn out to be better for you.

Good luck!