Three quick thoughts.
The Work You Want to Keep Doing
On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It's to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing. -Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path
To which I’d add, don’t just automatically assume that the work you want to keep doing will generate income or permit you the energetic and cognitive surplus to have a bread job on the side. Financial Independence might (might!) be right for you if your freedom-to pursuits are of a non-remunerative flavor. Consult your inner truth on this one.
You are the nucleus
The Permaculture approach to designing succession is to make an overall master plan, but to then start with the nucleus and expand out.
The master plan is important so that development doesn’t trap itself. You don’t want to paint yourself in a corner.
But with that master plan as a check, you want to develop from that nucleus and expand organically from there. The nucleus serves as a smaller scale, low stakes learning project, but it also serves to increase resilience and self-sufficiency of the discipline from which you can build upon.
You build your foundation as you go, building capacities, strengths, and connections.
If there is one message from Deep Response, it is the echo of this design principle from permaculture. Start with the nucleus, or expect things to not go well.
(This also connects to the idea that it is important to ‘win’, because success spirals up and failure spirals down.)
We Need Not Wait to See What Others Do
Prefigurative politics is the attempt to embody or create pockets of the desired changes to be made while still existing within the substrate of the dominant system.
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi
The social movement of Going First.