A 25-year-old Vietnamese girl has left a stable job in Singapore behind to venture across the world’s biggest deserts, packed with a full heart and a passion for self-discovery.

Having spent seven years studying in Canada, one year of exchange in the UK, and two and a half years working at Bloomberg in Singapore, Vu Phuong Thanh has decided to get out of her comfort zone and pursue her passion by conquering four of the biggest deserts in the world on foot.

In October 2015, Thanh finished the 250 kilometer Atacama Crossing in Chile, fulfilling her dream of becoming the first Vietnamese to do so.

While the Atacama is recognized as the driest place on earth by National Geographic Magazine, Thanh has no intention of stopping there.

In 2016 she is scheduled to compete in three additional races across three of the harshest deserts in the world: the Sahara in Namibia, the hottest, Antarctica, the coldest, and the Gobi Desert in China, the windiest.

These races, plus the Atacama which she will also complete again, make up what is know as the “4 Deserts Race Series,” an annual series of 250-kilometer ultra-marathons across four different deserts around the world.

TIME magazine recognized the race series as the world’s leading endurance events in both 2009 and 2010.

Thanh’s decision to abandon her comfortable life to take on such an arduous journey was by no means spontaneous.

“It took me seven months to make the decision,” Thanh said.

The death of a friend’s sister in the Nepal earthquake in April 2015 was the thing that finally motivated her to “not let her youth go to waste.”

“Two and a half years working has allowed me to save quite a sum to buy my own house and settle down, just like my parents would have wanted it,” Thanh said. “However, while you can always get back to your job and remake the money you’ve spent, you cannot reclaim your youth.”

“If I don’t do it now, will I still be able to do it when I’m 30 or 40?” Thanh said.

She did confess though that the question she feared most from her relatives was, “When will you get back to work?”

“Sometimes I find it hard to even convince myself that what I’m doing is also a kind of work, that I’m investing in myself, and that I’m diverting from the conventional path, let alone explaining it to others. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate the office life. Some people find it constraining, but I personally love the office life. But you only live once, and I can’t stand the thought of living my entire life without understanding who I am or the potential of my dreams,” Thanh confessed.

Thanh said she once grabbed a piece of paper and a pen to calculate how much her dream would cost. It turned out to be a small fortune in time and money.

“I was startled and confused at first, and was just sitting there shaking. But then I thought to myself that mindset is regressive and cowardly, so I tore the paper up and threw it away,” she said.

“Everybody wants a convenient life, but I can’t let the fire of passion smolder in my heart for too long before it goes out,” Thanh concluded.

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