It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ’Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

Crisp’s quip warns against living too long in a role you secretly disdain while consoling yourself with a fantasy of your “real” vocation. The comic contrast—pig farming versus ballet—sharpens the point: habits, skills, and even taste are shaped by what you repeatedly do, not by what you claim you were “meant” to do. Over time, the work you perform (even badly) becomes your identity and aesthetic; you acclimatize to its demands and limitations until they feel natural. The line is both existential and practical: choose deliberately, because drift hardens into character, and postponing change can make change psychologically impossible.