Do anything you wanna do

"Tired of doing day jobs
With no thanks for what I do
I'm sure I must be someone
Now I'm gonna find out who"
Eddie & The Hot Rods "Do Anything You Wanna Do" (1977)

I've been here before, you know.  Wanting change, but not really knowing how to effect it -- dissatisfied with where I am, but not making any progress.  Except now, I am beginning to feel like I have some tools to work with.

In my last post, I mentioned John Williams' book Screw Work, Let's Play, and listed all the things I'd do if I could whatever I liked for a whole year.   The only trouble is, there's so many ideas and it's not necessarily possible to do all of them if you only have one year -- so instead you get to imagine that you have infinite opportunities, or for the sake of brevity in this case, seven.

 

This is my list of what careers I would follow over my now-various years of play.  There isn't actually seven of them in my case, but it might expand later -- I figure it can only help to add more as I think of them.

Year One: Adventure

Pro-surfer, snowboarder, rock climber -- you name the adventure, I'm on it.  As a side-note, my interest in adventure sports is pretty funny -- at school, I sucked at PE, and was the despair of many teachers who found that I didn't measure up to my athlete older brother.  It turns out since then that I don't hate sports at all, I just have to discover them in my own time -- and if lessons at school had involved more adventure and less ball games, perhaps things would have been different...

Year Two: Super Hero.

Save the animals. Help the people. Save the world.  I'd rescue sea turtles of central America and the beautiful Bongo Antelope in the mountains of Kenya.  I'd do aid work in disaster zones, build schools in developing countries.  I'd spend a season as a fire-lookout in a national forest, helping spot forest fires before they start.  I probably wouldn't actually have any super-powers though.

Year Three: Artist.

Poet, writer, sculptor, painter.  My days would be spent learning, doing, and expressing.

Year Four: Traveller.

Seeing the world, taking pictures, taking notes, dreaming. Always moving on.

Year Five: Buddhist.

Spend a year in a monastery -- studying zen, eating rice.

I feel like I am making just the tiniest, little bit of progress here.  It might not seem like it to an outsider -- it could seem I have a lot of dreams but no practical ideas on making any of them into how to get paid to do what I love.  But the first step is I have to work out what I enjoy, and what I would want to do.

In my current sales role, despite doing well against my own targets -- for the moment, at least --  there's not a moment's doubt that this isn't what I want to be doing, especially not here, and especially when they start kicking us for not meeting the weekly sales targets.  The sooner I figure out where to be, the better.