Sat 30 Apr 2005
Is it something I love to do?
In my last post I mentioned three criteria to look for if you’re thinking about turning an avocation into a vocation. Just like on the cop shows, you have to have motive, means, and opportunity. First up is motive: Do you love doing it?
According to my parents, I learned to read around the age of 2 1/2. Even before I started school, I was known as the little kid who read all the time. All that reading inevitably led to the next step. In elementary school, I wrote short stories (based on the superhero playacting that my friends and I did at recess), and had my mom type them up. I’d bind my “books” with cardboard and contact paper, and enter them in district creative writing contests. I usually got some sort of ribbon, but at that age, so did everyone else.
In middle and high school, I was one of the geeky kids, so naturally I took to satire. Sometimes I’d rip on the popular crowd; other times I’d target a teacher, and hope my masterpiece didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Once I wrote a doozy of a poem about a local poet who guest taught our English class that week. I skewered everything from her politics to her teeth. I got big laughs from everyone — everyone except my English teacher and the poet herself. Someone I showed it to had left it behind in class. I apologized to her face (the hardest thing I’d ever done), ripped up the offending piece of poetry and burned it. I still cringe when I think of it.
The point of this little retrospective indulgence (and there’s more where that came from) is that I enjoy writing. I always have. Even when it got me into trouble. I also enjoy some aspects of software development, but mostly the creative side. I guess no one really enjoys debugging or code maintenance. But even the problem-solving bits don’t grab me very much. I like designing an application from scratch, at a high level. I like seeing the pieces come together and begin to work just as I imagined them. But once the big-picture stuff is done, I’m ready to move on.
I’m not saying that your job has to be the most fun and compelling way you spend your time. If that were the only thing that mattered, I wouldn’t need to cover means and opportunity. But taking a little pleasure in what you get paid for goes a long way.
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This is what I’d like to call a super-truth. Somehow it makes so much sense and is so simple that people are afraid to live by these ideals because work is supposed to be, well… work. The argument to this thought is the ideal that a living doesn’t have to be work, and flowing from that naturally is that life should be your passion of passions.
I’m finding this message seems to be following me around lately. I just watched The Incredibles.
good nod to Frost
I don’t know if it’s the community I run with, but it seems like everyone I know loves and wants to write for a living. Sometimes, it makes me cynically wonder if we can all do it. But I do agree that pleasure in what you get paid for is key. I’m just about to graduate and launch out into a job, and I’m hoping to find a career that stimulates and excites me, even if it’s not my favorite thing in the world.