Does being everything mean being nothing?

We all show interest in something from a young age. That particular interest should then be embraced with education, practice and experience. In the long run, it creates our life path.
This “path” determines who we become, it determines our habits, the friends we choose and the people around us. It puts us at a certain place in the society we live in and we share all the respect and judgment that people alike are given.
With a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, this interest can evolve into a profession. We can make a living of it by selling what we love and what we are good at. Some people find their passion by the age of 12 and grow up to become professionals, masters and geniuses in the same field. But not everyone has that much luck. There are cases where individuals can’t find their place in society or they are forced to do something very distant or different from what they love. The worst case is when people label themselves as something and do not allow themselves to change, therefore not allowing themselves to grow. So the question remaining is: should we really stick to that one interest our whole life ?
When I was 4 years old I started building Legos. I didn’t realize it back then, but my mind was fit for building stuff and using imagination and creativity. Once I became too old for playing with bricks, I needed a new way of expressing myself. This is when Hip Hop music happened. Fascinated by the rhythms and sounds used for creating it, I wanted to become a music producer. Starting off by remaking existing songs, I later become the producer of top artists in the industry. At that point, I was the DJ at parties, knew people at the club and was hanging out at the cool places with all the cool people. While making music, I was observing the things happening behind it. The money. Many people who were not exposed to the public eye were making more money than all the faces in the front. The idea to study business was born right there.
I started studying economics. I instantly fell in love with all the principles and laws of the economy. My main goal was to learn as much as I could about the financial markets and the money. I went from baggy jeans and long t-shirts to pants and a blazer. I started to care about the status of people around me. I gave more respect to people with greater fortune, as it was closer to the main thing in my mind — money and how to acquire it. So I communicated with people in tuxedos during the day and hung out with party animals at night. I maintained all the relations with all the different people as it allowed me to be more open minded and see a bigger picture.
I got my first real job at a bank. Remember the creative Lego kid? Well this was not a place where he could be creative and build things. This was a place where everyone was told what to do or even what to say in order to increase the bank’s profit margins. Yes, everyone feels good when their pockets are full, but no one wants their heart empty. I did love the fact that I was practicing economics in real life, but the 9 to 5 life was killing me. In search of a better reason to wake up in the morning, I went to work for a consulting and auditing firm. This is where my interests merged for the first time. It is amazing how we can learn from one type of science and apply it to another and how we can see things differently when we have experience in another field. This is what Da Vinci did. First, he studied the human body, then he painted it to great detail and precision. He practiced biology and studied animals such as birds, then used his engineering skills and scratched the first idea for an airplane.
While making music I was working with a lot of different production software. I even learned how to use Photoshop to create the art for my music, and also a bit of video production. So I was good with computers. In my new job, despite doing auditing and payroll stuff, my task was to also automate the working process as much as I could and make it easier and more productive. So, I was creating software for economic purposes, used the building logic to make it efficient, and used design skills to make it look simple and easy to use. Of course, at this point I wanted to hang out with people who understood software development. These are the people with the most brilliant minds. They can put everything down to 1 and 0. Logic is practiced in its purest form. Everything was going great. But there was one piece missing. The forward momentum. I became obsessed by this idea that things should always move forward. Progress was the only thing that mattered. Day to day the most important thing was being better than yesterday. The crucial part of this mind set is problem solving. As long as you have a problem, you can solve it and make things better than they were. The job I had at the time was not allowing that at all times. Sometimes you were supposed to do what your manager told you and not what you thought was important. I was observing these huge problems in the workflow of the company and I could not do anything about it. Sometimes these problems affected my work as well. That’s why I had to move.
What is the smartest thing to do with all this experience and mind set?
- Work at your own company.
What should you be doing there?
- Everything.
I now work at my own company. What the company sells or does doesn’t really matter as long as I make the decisions on what will happen next.
Here is the recipe:
Find an industry with a problem. See if you can solve the problem with your experience and available resources. Do it differently from the competition.
It’s pretty simple. Every business can be put down to this 3 steps. Of course there are a lot of things inside these 3 steps. But the beauty is that you get to decide on what and how it should be done.
So now I am constructing the way the company is going to work: from which products are best fit for the market to when to offer them. I am using my economics and business skills to be able to offer the best prices in the market. I create my own ads and marketing strategy. I create my own software for executing my work and use my own workflow. I am not the best at every task, but that’s the point. There is always something to work on, something to learn and get better at. The forward momentum is present at any given moment.
Not limiting myself on what I should focus on is one of the best decisions I ever made. Every information can be connected with another one from a totally different source. You do not have to label yourself. You can be a banker and an athlete at the same time. You can be a CEO and have a band with a debut album on the way too. By being nothing, you allow yourself to be everything.