Advice

Learn From Other Geeks

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I like to use the things I geek out over in my career, which is somewhat obvious by the fact I help run a blog about the very subject.  I'm a big advocate that hobbies, jobs, and interests really should be mostly the same thing.

However, it's too easy to get caught up in our own obsessions, our own geeky, our own fanning.  Sure we can learn a lot from our obsession with video games, our passion for digital art, and our interest in writing.

However if you really want to be a passionate fan-to-pro type you need to study the geekery of others.

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Inconvenience Yourself!

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Are you ready to face the challenges for your career?  For your life's dream?  Are you ready to walk through the metaphorical obstacle course of your perfect job (unless it's not metaphorical)?

Are you sure you're ready?

If you want to face down the challenges of following your profan/progeek/protaku dream job, I recommend practicing dealing with inconvenience by inconveniencing yourself.

The more you work to deal with challenges on your own terms, the more you test and push your limits, the more you'll be able to deal with them when your career throws them right in your face.

Next time you're working to organize your den, go all the way and take that extra hour to really deal with that pile of papers.  Face the boredom and you'll develop discipline.

Next time you've got to go talk to an annoying salesperson to get that new piece of furniture, face it down.  It'll help you deal with challenging co-workers and clients.

Next time you've got to finish that piece of fanart, try out that new coloring technique even if it takes longer or risks failure.  It'll get you used to building new skills even in adverse situations.

Go on.  Inconvenience yourself.  It'll prepare you for the challenges you'll face in the future.

– Steven Savage

You May Have a Job – But Do You Have a Life?

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You have a great job.  A fantastic job.  You love what you do.  You love what you make.  You hate to leave work – and probably don't really leave as much as people may think.

If you're a progeek (such as myself) of course that's kind of a holy career grail – the job you love that embodies all your interests.

However you may have the ideal job – but do you have a life?

This of course is often a massively loaded question for us progeeks and profans – our goal is to turn our hobbies into our careers.  We may not have a life to some people as we're geeks and otaku, but we often have quite a diverse and interesting life – and turning what we love into jobs would seem to make our lives even more, well, lifelike.

That can be wrong.  We get it wrong on scale.

A job is what we do to earn a living and do something we (hopefully) consider important in our society and community.

A career is the path of our jobs, of our professional development.  It's a the arc, the progress, we make in manifesting what we like to do and care about.

A life is the entire big picture, how everything comes together.  It is our past and our future, it is what we care about and do.  It is, in short, who we are.  "Having a life" means having something that matters to us, that has context and meaning, a past and a future.

You can have a "life" and be an introvert off writing code or books or what have you – if that truly is part of an overall, fulfilling life.  You can be a genius on a job you love – but with no arc to your career and no sense of the bigger picture, it's really shallow and meaningless.  The stereotypical nerd off writing amazing code with few friends may indeed be more happy than someone beloved, famous, and facing a meaningless life.

Having a life is one where what we do, who we know, our careers, and our job come together to make something meaningful to us, something that's part of the even bigger picture – of what and who we care about, and of what matters to us.  It's the history of our development and growth as people, where we know why we do what we do and how we'll get where we want to go.

So you may have a job.  But don't mistake it for a life.

– Steven Savage