Impulse

I’ve been send­ing my resume around, sniff­ing out job oppor­tu­ni­ties in the tech world again. A friend of mine, curi­ous at this choice after spend­ing 5 years on other cre­ative pur­suits, asked the good ques­tion: “Why?” I liked me response enough that I decided to post it here:

Funny how paths don’t go straight, but in more of a cir­cle.  It’s a bit like the movie It’s a Wonderful Life (vis­i­ble in it’s entirety on google) — Jimmy Stewart keeps try­ing to travel to dis­tant lands and adven­tures, only to come to appre­ci­ate later what he already had all around him in his home town. 

My story is just like the clas­sic:  Once upon a time I worked in a fortress of soft­ware and grew to hate it.  I thought I was bored of tech, so I left the land of tech­nol­ogy for the radi­ant fields of cre­ativ­ity.  I made movies in the land of film­mak­ing, hunted Definitive Moments in the land of pho­tog­ra­phy, wrote sto­ries in the halls of fic­tion, and even rode the roller coaster of startups.

I noticed that these cre­ative careers didn’t seem all roman­tic and glowy as they had seemed.  In fact, because I had walked away from every­thing I was good at (in the tech world) to do things I had barely done before, it was quite a bit harder.  Further, it never really “felt right”.

Meanwhile, I was con­stantly play­ing with tech — prob­a­bly about 40hrs / week.

So, I climbed a craggy rock in my mind and thought about what I enjoy: imag­in­ing new things, cre­atively solv­ing prob­lems, build­ing things that hadn’t existed before, syn­the­siz­ing new ideas, work­ing on some­thing that demanded an inten­sity in bal­ance with how pas­sion­ate I felt about it, work­ing with oth­ers, learn­ing new things.  These are all things I can do in any field. It’s all design — whether it be soft­ware design, graphic design, story design, etc.

Why not do all that in a field I have a ton of expe­ri­ence, skills, and inter­est?  Meanwhile, I can get an extra help­ing in the so called “cre­ative” arts. 

After 5 years, I finally had come to under­stand wis­dom in Hugh MacLeod’s book, How to be Creative, namely: “Keep your day job”.   (I read that book 4 years ago; I guess it took one year per word to sink in)

I hadn’t got­ten burned out by tech at my old job, but by the fact that I was up in the senior man­age­ment cloud, man­ag­ing peo­ple instead of doing all those cre­ative things I listed above. 

With that, I turned my metaphor­i­cal horse around and rode back home to the land of tech — via a con­ve­nient sun­set, of course.

Now, this all doesn’t mean I’m aban­don­ing every­thing I did in the last five years — I’ve had too much fun doing it.  I’m just real­iz­ing that there’s ways to have my cake and eat it too.

Related posts:

1. Second Life
2. Alright already! I’ll pick a project
3. Decisions, deci­sions
4. Guilty admis­sions
5. I just met Tony Bennett’s producer