On becoming what you are
Excerpts from a letter to a friend
Note: This is a set of excerpts from a letter I sent Ma’ayan Plaut earlier this year. Ma’ayan had sent me a set of questions about life, career, and how I got to where I am today. I’ve redacted some things for the sake of not making myself look like too horrible a person. [Edits and explanations are in brackets.]
Did you know what you wanted at 14? Even if you didn’t have a clear answer, did you have an idea of what sort of things were out there, and who or how you could get to something related to it?
No… and yes. [At 14] I was a high school freshman who’d just been flung back into public school after two years at a Catholic prep school (side note: Rushmore is pretty much my junior high experience). I was pretty lost, had no friends, and was stuck taking a bunch of classes that I’d taken the year before, for the most part. I think I just wanted out.
But the year before, the president of the local university had come to speak at the prep school and drilled in our heads why a liberal arts degree was so essential to our success (and America’s) in The 21st Century (which we capitalized back then because It Was A Big Concept Way Far In The Future.) And I felt that tug — to try and be someone who would be well rounded and be able to address The Big Problems that were coming in The 21st Century.
At varying points in high school I vacillated between lawyer and psychologist. I don’t know why I didn’t pick one. Maybe because I didn’t want to be pinned down. [The curse of liberal arts, perhaps.]
I headed off to Colorado, with 20,000 students and endless possibilities (and distractions). I think by then I was considering a poli sci degree… and then I bombed out of Poli Sci 101….
From then on, well, I had that liberal arts experience I had wanted — in the name of trying to find the right major. I was a Latin major until my senior year, when (due to a professor that hated me) I switch to environmental studies. I remain the only CU student to ever major in environmental studies and minor in Latin.
I spent the five years after graduation… well, kinda lost. Moved to Seattle in ‘95, temped for a year, worked for a UK charity for the developmentally disabled for a year, came home, and found myself in the dotcom boom. But very, very lost….
It was the dotcom bust that had me washing up on the shores of higher ed. But it took me a while to realize what it was I was out to do. About ten years, in fact.
When I was cleaning out my desk for the last time at [the University of Washington, where I was Director of Web Communications for the School of Public Health], I found this list I’d typed up around 2002 or so. On it I listed seven things I wanted to accomplish with the School of Public Health website. As I looked over the list, I realized I’d accomplished six of the seven things (everything from building a faculty information and publication database to completing a redesign that focused on content rather than brochureware). The seventh thing (build out RSS to syndicate school content in the wider public health community) had been superseded by technology (I built a Twitter account instead to do the same thing).
That I did six of those seven things was remarkable for an office with one web dev + a few cycles from the IT guy and the DBA. That I’d done it all by 2007, well… that’s remarkable.
But it was 2011 when I discovered this document. What had I been doing those last 3-4 years?
What makes you feel like a path is what you need? Is it a path, or an end goal, or a series of checkpoints? Or is it something beyond you that you’re seeking for stability, happiness, etc.?
I’m not sure. I’m not in a field that HAS a career path. None of us who work on the web are [in a field like that]. At the same time, I keep thinking there should be one.
At one point in The Wind Rises, the Italian plane designer [Caproni] tells the protagonist, “An artist is only creative for 10 years.” It’s an inside joke (Miyazaki is making fun of his long career), but I think there might be something to it. It’s made me wonder if I need to stop seeing a career as a continuous thread and instead see it as 5 to 10 year segments. Even with UW you can divide my career there roughly in half — the opening 5 years where I tried to work out what my job was, and the remaining ~5 years where I matured into this polymathic web geek that at the same time was running out of ideas. I’m seeing [my last employer], and UX in general, as [just another] 5 year segment. I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. I’m just going to keep going and hope I can learn enough to move on to the next interesting thing.
It’s been said that I’ve never been happy in work. And it’s true. I never have been. But for as depressed as I have been (and can be), I hate boredom far more…. I have to keep things moving. When things don’t move, I stagnate. And then I wither.
Knowing what you know now, what would you have changed in the past for this career now, or possibly something different?
…I’ve thought at times there were other things I could have been. A teacher, obviously. But I find some people think “teaching” equals “being well-spoken” (I find they also think the clergy have that same singular skill set). And yes, I’m well-spoken and thoughtful, but the best teachers I’ve known are also remarkable listeners and amazing at being able to turn the obtuse into a vernacular students understand and can build on. Those two things… I’m working on those. Funny thing is, those are the two skills I most need to be a great interaction designer. Soft skills, really. Not ones any university is capable of teaching you.
I’ve also thought about being an accountant. Which is odd, but work for me was always supposed to be about “enabling you to do the things you love,” not about “doing what you love.” And the web is full of “doing what you love.” I keep thinking that spending 40 hours a day buried in numbers and GAAP rules and SOX requirements would provide that separation I need between work and the rest of life I so don’t have — and am so desperate for of late.
We don’t learn emotional detachment in college. And “doing what you love” lies to us that we need to be emotionally attached to work for work to be meaningful. But “doing what you love” is such a new concept, one privileged educated white folk can aspire to while everyone else just does their work and collects their check. And I know my lack of emotional detachment has kept me from seeing that work wasn’t always about happiness. It used to be about attitude. It used to be about showing up, doing a good job, and moving forward.
Photo credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/emdot/107905416/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/skinnyde/62859435/
