If you read the first lesson I’ve learned in the nine years I’ve been living  in California, you will recall that I subscribe to Hunter S. Thompson’s notion of buying the ticket and taking the ride.

I cannot recommend it enough.

That said, a word of caution: Don’t burn the boats.

It’s a fun thing to say, burn the boats. And I do hate to disagree with Julius Caesar, the man who is credited with espousing the saying. Sounds epic and daring and, to be sure, it is.

I just have yet to see it work.

Can’t tell you how many individuals have moved to California, putting all of their eggs in a single basket — thereby burning the metaphorical boats — only to find that basket wholly unreliable.

Within a year, oftentimes less, they’re gone.

This has happened dozens and dozens of times.

When I moved to California, I did so with a safety net under me. My long-term intention was to become a full-time freelancer, able to write and advance my media career while also playing as much beach volleyball as I could, to the point that beach volleyball would develop into a career of some sorts. What that looked like exactly, I wasn’t sure, but each week, my goal was to take one tiny step in that direction until I arrived, wherever that arrival may be.

It worked better than I could have imagined, and there was a great deal of luck and timing and good fortune involved. I cannot take full credit for any of that.

But a major factor in all of that — and, in a larger sense, my life as I currently know it — coming to pass is that I didn’t burn the boats. I moved to California with a full-time job, thanks entirely to my best friend, Jason Wheatley, and his wife, Jenny Kim, who took me on as an educational counselor for their company, Admission Masters, despite me having exactly zero experience in that realm.

Without them, my life is not what it is today.

That job took immense amounts of pressure off my fledgling freelancing career, allowing me to take my time as my parallel careers — writing and beach volleyball — developed. I never went into a tournament needing to qualify for the money, and I never covered a high school football game hoping against all hope the Orange County Register would promote me to full-time or I’d have to move back to Florida or Maryland. Some might say that this strategy removes the benefit of the sense of urgency that would inevitably come with the do-or-die nature burning the boats would have presented. There is probably some truth to that. But I’d argue that it allowed for beach volleyball and writing, be it about volleyball or Pac-12 football or high school sports, to remain art for art’s sake. I played it because I loved it. I wrote about beach volleyball for free because nobody else was.

Any money I made was a bonus.

I was floored when I received my first payment from Lee Feinswog at Volleyball Magazine: $50 for a preview of 2017 AVP Huntington Beach, and another $50 for a recap.

I listener of SANDCAST recently asked when I knew beach volleyball would change my career path. If I had to pick a moment, that was likely it.

Still: This was still mostly free work, and much of what I did in the sport — and still do — was either pro bono or heavily discounted, given the market conditions of media in the sport of beach volleyball. I was paid $50 a story for most stories, a few bucks higher for others. These are ludicrously low numbers relative to the sports magazine writing market, but I didn’t care, because it was a bonus, and because I didn’t need it — because I didn’t burn the boats. We didn’t pay ourselves for SANDCAST until this year, seven years after its founding, and even then, it was a modest sum, less than Tri’s mortgage for a month. We even lost money as a company at our inaugural SANDCAST Tour event in Montana.

Art remained art for art’s sake, because it could.

Admission Masters continued to be my safety net while I slowly built my presence in the beach volleyball world. Four years later, while adding gigs covering beach volleyball for Volleyball Magazine, DiG Magazine and p1440, I was bringing in enough for beach volleyball, and my various roles within it, to become my full-time job.

If you feel an urge, a compulsion, to take a chance, to buy the ticket, as Thompson would say, I cannot recommend you take that ride enough. But to increase the odds of your adventure, whatever it may be, becoming a successful and enduring one, please don’t burn the boats.

And then, with your boats still firmly in place, say yes to everything.