Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
UseYourGeekery – where the future is.
What you do. What you create. Who you work for. Where you work. Who you work with. All ways to channel your hobbies, fantoms, obsession, geekery, and otakudom into careers. All specific ways to turn what you like into a job and a life.
But there's one more way you can use your interests to create a job, career, and even a new profession. You can base your job, your place of work, your career on where you see the future going.
You've planned out your career course. You've got an idea of where you are and where you want to go. Spreadsheets and notes and documents and dog-eared books mark the way to your future.
That planned career course gets interrupted. You move. You change jobs. The economy is ruined by stupid and greedy people. Your plan is temporarily derailed, perhaps horribly so.
Of course once it's derailed, you get right back on your career plan. You're no quitter, you won't stop, you won't give up.
Have you ever considered the fact maybe you should?
I want you to take a look at your career, and take ten minutes to visualize utter, massive success. What your dream job and career and indeed life is like (they should all be the same, really). Go crazy, go nuts for that ten minutes, and treat yourself to it.
I'll wait, go on.
So how did it feel? Good? Amazing? Any surprises? I imagine you got some new ideas out of it, and some surprising directions.
We too often try and "be reasonable" about our goals, but that often degenerates into us selling ourselves short and aiming low. We forget that part of creating solutions is dreaming them up, and part of that is knowing where we want to go. We have to have an idea of where we want to be in order to get there.
It helps to be "unreasonable" now and then and dream up a massive image of success. It's educational, surprising, and may give us some ideas.
What are you afraid of?
– Steven Savage