I received three responses from yesterday’s journal. Thanks for your advice, my friends. It is greatly appreciated.
There must be something in the air. I’ve been thinking along similar lines all day. I’ve been having this thought process on and off ever since graduating. It must be something about the loss of structure and immediacy of goals. It’s become ever more present since my aunt passed on. The whole idea—life is short, make an impact, do something good, be somebody. All of which are correct, yet there are so many ways to achieve “success” it’s hard to decide what is right. That’s what it comes down to, what is right. Well, what’s right? How the hell should I know? I’ve tasted so little of the world that it’s pathetic. Yet I fear that even with the utmost effort I’ll never be able to come close to tasting the amount necessary to discover the right path to “success”. Sure, it’s nice to do stuff on the side, but I want to be consumed. I don’t want my life to be on the side. I want the path that’s right, the path that will consume me and allow me to propel myself to success. Now, how do I get there?
I’ve been living my life in this personal crisis mode probably since I started working here at MVP. Don’t worry, you just sorta get used to it. :)
Seriously, my list is different, but the problem is the same. Should I:
- bust ass on PCC all the time?
- spend my spare time writing songs and working on music, leading toward starting a band and recording a record someday?
- focus on writing fiction and maybe working up to a novel?
- work on screenplays and hone my craft in that area?
- ditch all this and go back to school for film or cultural criticism or something?
I spend most of my time feeling guilty for wasting time. Yet, I don’t really, because I help to put out an amazing website and still write good songs on occasion and am pretty good at my “day job.” But I still feel like I waste time.
And like you, I wonder where I should focus, and how I can really focus, because then won’t all these other ambitions just wither and die? and what if I pick the wrong one? what if I toil away at the wrong dream for too long?
It’s really hard to pick, which is why I usually rotate in and out of doing ten different things at the same time, which puts me in a cycle of working hard on lots of things for a while, then burning out for a week or two, then getting back into it.
But I’ve been placing most of my focus and energy on PCC for a long time now, because I feel like it’s the key not only to my dreams, but to yours as well. If we do that and it fails, then oh well. Our lives and resumes will probably be much the better for trying to start our own business, and we’re both good enough at what we do that we can just get new jobs in our fields and move on sorrowfully. But if it works, then you get your dream of being a very successful entreprenur, and I get my dream of exhilarating creative freedom, and can parlay that into doing other stuff. Look at that lady who edits Nerve.com; she’s got the site together, it’s cooking, and now she’s writing a novel on the site. It’d be so amazing to have the freedom to focus on the projects you want to do, and then to have a platform to make those projects happen.
Plus, we have the energy and the resources together to make this happen. I know it.
Anyway. This has become more about me than you, but I just wanted you to know that I think I know exactly how you feel, because I feel the same way too. Maybe it’s endemic of post-college working drones; where college offered the opportunity to do many things all at once, working life makes it harder to do that and forces you to choose. Or maybe we’re just creative types who naturally breed this kind of stimulation. I dunno.
I do think that it’s okay to be pragmatic about dreams, and to say, I’m gonna choose PCC because this is the best bet I have right now and to make it happen would be very kick-ass. Does that mean you can’t find chicks, work out, study other things? No; we all need to maintain balanced lives. But it does mean that something like a cable access show, which would be tons of fun and creatively stimulating but would get us nowhere PCC-wise, might be a bad idea.
Yet in spite of that, I still want to start a band soon, which could eat up tons of time that would be better spent elsewhere. Those balls, they just keep jugglin’, jugglin’…
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