Pick the path you can defend at 30, not just the one that’s easiest to explain at dinner.

There is a difference between a choice that sounds good tonight and one that still makes sense when you are living inside it. Explaining a plan at dinner rewards whatever is easy to say in a sentence. Being thirty and inside the plan rewards something else: work you can stand, money that covers your life, people you respect.

Picture a specific ordinary day five or ten years out under each option you are weighing, including the dull parts. Ask which version you could explain to yourself then without flinching. That is a harder test than the dinner table and a much more useful one.