When I was in my 20s during the dot com boom, I decided I'd take up flying to peruse a lifelong dream. I was loving it. After a couple of months I was almost ready for my first solo flight.<p>Then I started looking at my total monthly expenses for instruction and plane rental. When I looked at the numbers, I decided that this must be a good time to buy a house. I was spending what was, for me, a great deal of money. The money I was spending on flying easily paid for a house payment once I made that decision.<p>One other thing that was quite unexpected. At the time, I was working as a consultant doing large ERP system implementations for fortune 500 companies. As anyone who does this for a living will tell you, this can be a very stressful occupation. The multitasking aspect of flying was like: watch 15 things all at once, make sure nothing goes wrong, and if you screw up, the consequences will be extremely dire, and everything is very time critical, and all eyes are on you as you make very important actions. At some point, it occurred to me: "hey! This is exactly the same kind of stress I feel at work!"<p>Another thing that surprised me initially about flying small planes. It feels like being in a flying lawnmower, nothing at all like being in a commercial jet. It made me feel very sick at first. They say you get used to it with time.<p>I think, though, that at some point the situational awareness and multitasking becomes second nature, and you can do it feeling merely alert instead of stressed and overtaxed. But I never spent enough money on flying time to get to that point personally.<p>There's nothing like the fun of staring at a map and plotting where you're going to go, though, I hope I'm financially successful enough to get back into it some day when other affairs are in order.