You've finally figured out what you want to do with your life – start a company, launch a website, design an app, or found a non-profit. The only problem is that you can't afford to quit your current job in order to pursue it fulltime. So, where should you start? What's the best way to get your passion project moving? And how can you tell when you're ready to strike out on your own? Knowing where your professional passions lie puts you in a good position. Lots of people don't know what they want to do. They're struggling because they know they're not happy doing what they're doing, but they don't know what else is out there. An idea is certainly a promising start, but executing it while holding down a busy fulltime job is undoubtedly a challenge. You've nailed the one percent inspiration; now it's time for the 99% perspiration. If you are committed to making it happen, there are ways. So, here are some suggestions to get your idea up and running.

Begin by sketching out exactly what it is you want to achieve. Is it a large, scalable company? Is it a small company? Is it a charitable organization? You want to have specific, concrete goals to shoot for, including revenue targets and desired social impact. Next, make a timeline based on what you think you can reasonably accomplish towards your project in the time you have. Your biggest constraint is how many hours you have to devote to this side project, so commit to an end-date when you'd ideally like to leave your job and solve backwards from there. As you chip away on your project, continue to give your job the attention it needs. Your day job takes precedence. You must also be willing to extend your timeline if your proposed end-date doesn't seem realistic the closer you get.

Having financial security gives you the opportunity to build your business on your terms. But if your ultimate goal is to one day leave your job and devote yourself fulltime to your project, you will need a financial cushion "“ particularly to get you through the early stages of your new venture. Your timeline should include clearly defined savings targets for each month or quarter and "“ if necessary "“ a plan for raising money from investors. If you don't have sufficient funds when you leave your job, you will make bad business decisions out of fear.

You should list the concrete skills you need to develop in order to be successful at pursuing your passion full-time. Once you have a list of necessary skills, figure out how to acquire them. Perhaps you need to take a class; maybe an internship or apprenticeship is in order. Identify ways to stretch your job description to learn new skills. For example, if knowing how to build websites will be important to your new venture, see if your current job will subsidize a class in web design that will also help you in your current job.

Compared to the eternal cosmos envisaged by the ancients, our own universe is something of a Johnny-come-lately. It seems to have been around a mere 14 billion years or so, beginning with the Big Bang. And its future may well be bounded too. According to current cosmological scenarios, it is destined either to disappear abruptly in a Big Crunch some eons down the road, or to fade gradually into a dark and chill nothingness. The temporal finitude of our universe – here today (but not yesterday), gone tomorrow – makes its existence seem all the more insecure and contingent. And mysterious. A world with solid ontological foundations, it seems, just wouldn't behave like this. It would exist eternally and imperishably. Such a world, unlike the finite Big Bang universe, would have an aura of self-sufficiency. It might even harbour the cause of its own being.

But what if our universe is not all there is? What if it is a part of some greater ensemble?

One of the great lessons of the history of science is that reality always turns out to be more encompassing than anyone imagined. At the beginning of the twentieth century, our universe was thought to consist of just the Milky Way galaxy, sitting all by itself in an infinite space. Since then, we have learned that the Milky Way is merely one of a hundred billion or so similar galaxies. And that's just the observable universe. The current theory that best explains the Big Bang is called the 'new inflationary cosmology'. As it happens, this theory predicts that universe-engendering explosions like the Big Bang should be a fairly routine occurrence. (As one friend of mine observed, it would be very odd if the Big Bang came with a label that said, 'This mechanism operated only once.')

In the inflationary scenario, our universe – the one that suddenly popped into existence some 14 billion years ago – bubbled out of the spacetime of a preexisting universe. Instead of being all of physical reality, it's just an infinitesimal part of an ever-reproducing 'multiverse'. Although each of the bubble universes within this multiverse had a definite beginning in time, the entire self-replicating ensemble may be infinitely old. The eternity that seemed lost with the discovery of the Big Bang is thus regained.

With an eternal world – whether of the inflationary variety or some other – there is no inexplicable 'creation moment'. There is no role for a 'first cause'. There are no arbitrary 'initial conditions'. An eternal world thus seems to satisfy the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The way it is at any moment can be explained by the way it was the previous moment. Indeed, its existence at any moment can be

explained by its existence the previous moment. Should that be enough to dispel any lingering sense of mystery?