高清福利片

If I wonder whether I followed my dreams, and the answer is 鈥測es鈥� - it must have been a fever dream!

I started work in the 1960s, as a physicist at the Port Kembla Steelworks and immediately joined the Steel Industries Auto Club, to race rally cars on deserted back roads.

I loved the rally cars but not the steelworks culture, so I left. I headed off on a tangent to New Guinea where I worked as a tutor with a side interest in filmmaking with research into hair and wool. This research later helped me win an Ig Nobel prize for 鈥済roundbreaking鈥� research on belly button fluff and why it was almost always blue! Who would have thought!

I left New Guinea after a bit聽鈥� feeling I had kind of 鈥渇ailed鈥� again.

But come the 1970s, I entered my 'drug-crazed hippie years', making my living as a long-haired, dope-smoking taxi driver who dreamt of being a filmmaker! I had a ball聽鈥� and had sideline gigs as a roadie, an apprentice car mechanic and electronics fiend.

From this motley bunch of parallel lives, I somehow fell into a scientific officer role in a cardiac lab. Part of my job was to film the flow of blood through the coronary arteries and 鈥� guess what?聽鈥� my earlier experience of building a film processing laboratory to make movies for MTV was crucial!

Once more I 鈥渄ropped out鈥� of work聽鈥� this time to study Biomedical Engineering. Along the way I bumped into the fabulous wild card , and for him I designed and built a machine to detect electrical signals from the human retina.

Finally, after completing my Masters, I had three separate offers to do a PhD.聽 But instead, I started again as a medical student.

I鈥檝e applied (and 鈥渇ailed鈥�) to be a NASA astronaut,聽 which fuelled my move into live-broadcasting the space shuttle launch on Triple J. From that early break my media career blasted off, in radio, TV, writing 48 books, speaking, podcasts and the internet.

I鈥檝e worked as a medical doctor and as a 4WD test-driver, a TV weatherman, a labourer and in many more jobs.

In total, I鈥檝e had 16 years of university education聽鈥� essentially for free. (Back then, the Australian governments saw Education as a Worthy Investment in the Future! That was another beautiful dream.)

Being told to 鈥渇ollow your dreams鈥� is totally useless if you don鈥檛 know where to begin! You might start off loving astronomy, but then fall in love with 17th-century Mongolian literature before shifting up a gear to become a plumber (without plumbing, there is no civilisation!).

And you need some degree of practicality聽鈥� or at least enough money to live on. In 2024, the economic gap between the poor and the wealthy in the USA has never been greater. To make the world a fairer place would be a noble dream!

For most of my life, I have been gloriously impractical with a dozen or more life changes. I never made a long-term plan. I never considered metaphorically sitting on top of the 鈥榯all building鈥�, seeing all the roads and picking the best path.

Instead, I made lots of short-term goals and plans. I don鈥檛 think of myself as a dreamer. I think of myself as someone with fanciful plans who focuses intently. Somehow by accident I鈥檝e ended up where I am now聽鈥� in my dream job. So maybe I sell myself short and really I have darn gone followed my dreams!

The message from my story is that you don't have to know all the answers; the dream is wanting to keep learning!

You can read about these stories and many more in my book聽A Periodic Tale聽鈥� My Sciencey Memoir.