ON THE TOWN:Follow your heart to a career path

This is for high school seniors and perhaps some juniors. And it may be relevant to their parents too.

My family moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1963, when I was 8 years old. For several years after we moved, I kept in touch by mail with my first best friend, Roy Redlich.

Back then, long distance telephone calls were considered expensive, so Roy and I traded letters, lots of long letters.

Around the time we moved, I started to carry an accessory with me everywhere I went, one more important to me than money or identification. That accessory was a pen.

I wrote down things all the time — on anything, anywhere. When I moved away from home in the ‘70s, I wrote letters to friends. Only one of them ever wrote back on a regular basis. I didn’t really care because I was more interested in writing letters than I was in receiving them.

When I had the chance to pick my high school classes, I chose the ones I knew gave essay exams, figuring I could write my way out of anything. The strategy worked, and I applied it in college too.

There are a lot of writing anecdotes from that time. To me, it was normal to place the importance of a pen over food and water.

Only one person, a high school English teacher named Yvonne Lefkowitz, ever noticed my habits. She told me on the last day of school in 1973 that I should be a writer.

I ignored her advice.

In 1996, I was three years into the ownership of an import business when a strange string of events occurred. What happened is too long to recount here, but with the encouragement of someone whose name you’d recognize, I dissolved my business over the next two years and changed careers to become a writer.

By November 1998, I was writing full-time.

The transition was not easy. During that period, our income was dramatically reduced, which caused some stress. But I never doubted that what I was doing was the right thing.

What kept me going was the feeling I had each time I sat down in front of a keyboard. Simply put, it felt as though that was where I belonged.

I have that feeling still and doubt that it will ever leave me. I sure hope it doesn’t because it feels too good.

My income is healthy. In a twist on a line used by a former talk show host, I make more than some, not as much as others.

What I have over almost all of them is job satisfaction.

There is only a small percentage of people who get up in the morning and go to work each day who actually look forward to doing so.

I write in lots of different styles each day. Sometimes I write letters, sometimes I write Web copy. Sometimes, it’s brochures or ads. But I am writing all the time.

Would I still be as satisfied today if I’d had, say, 20 more years of writing behind me? It’s hard to say. What I can say is that I do know people who have been in their careers for that long and are bored. I honestly believe that my excitement exists because this life is still relatively new to me.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I pursued writing earlier on in my life.

After all, it took me 25 years out of high school to finally figure out what I was meant to do.

And that’s the point of this message to you today.

My daughter is a junior in high school and has started down the path to deciding what she wants to do and where she wants to go to college.

My son is a high school freshman, but I have told them the same thing I am now going to tell you. It’s an old saying that goes, “Figure out what you love to do, then figure out how to make money at it.”

You have a lot of decisions to make over the next few months or over the next year. I believe, and I am living proof, that you will never go wrong if you follow your heart.