I feel like most of the big things in my life have just sort of happened to me... I took this bus, I drove this car, I got on this train, I walked down this street, I turned this corner, I opened this door, and I stepped into a bank... well, okay, not the bank part, but you get the idea.
The one really smart thing I did -- one that's paid off hugely ever since -- was shell out for aptitude testing at Johnson O'Connor (http://www.jocrf.org/). It wasn't cheap (several hundred dollars, and that was over 20 years ago), but it gave me the insights and information that I needed in order to choose paths (career and otherwise) that would be the most satisfying.
See, it turns out that one of the biggest factors in whether you feel satisfied with your life is whether or not you're using all of your high aptitudes. Some of us -- and I suspect it's true of a lot of us in fandom -- have what they call "too many aptitudes" because no defined job uses more than five, and if you have three or four or five beyond that that aren't getting exercised in some fashion, you're going to be twitchy and unsatisfied with your life. I was lucky; my "extra" aptitudes were musical, which could be satisfied by singing along with the car radio, and things like finger dexterity, so anything that had me spending time on a keyboard was good.
But the kicker was that it gave me the information I needed to leave computer programming (which I was pretty good at but left me restless, and I didn't know why) and find myself a job that could have been invented just for me (tech support help desk for a software vendor).
And I've used the information ever since in making choices about my life; I'm always aware of those aptitudes and I'm always thinking about how I can make use of them, whether in a job or a hobby or some other way.
That's the rational side of it. But most of the big things, well... I took this bus, I drove this car, I got on this train, I walked down this street, I turned this corner... and life sort of happened, and I floundered around until I found my place in wherever I'd ended up.
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Date: 7/12/07 08:30 pm (UTC)I feel like most of the big things in my life have just sort of happened to me... I took this bus, I drove this car, I got on this train, I walked down this street, I turned this corner, I opened this door, and I stepped into a bank... well, okay, not the bank part, but you get the idea.
The one really smart thing I did -- one that's paid off hugely ever since -- was shell out for aptitude testing at Johnson O'Connor (http://www.jocrf.org/). It wasn't cheap (several hundred dollars, and that was over 20 years ago), but it gave me the insights and information that I needed in order to choose paths (career and otherwise) that would be the most satisfying.
See, it turns out that one of the biggest factors in whether you feel satisfied with your life is whether or not you're using all of your high aptitudes. Some of us -- and I suspect it's true of a lot of us in fandom -- have what they call "too many aptitudes" because no defined job uses more than five, and if you have three or four or five beyond that that aren't getting exercised in some fashion, you're going to be twitchy and unsatisfied with your life. I was lucky; my "extra" aptitudes were musical, which could be satisfied by singing along with the car radio, and things like finger dexterity, so anything that had me spending time on a keyboard was good.
But the kicker was that it gave me the information I needed to leave computer programming (which I was pretty good at but left me restless, and I didn't know why) and find myself a job that could have been invented just for me (tech support help desk for a software vendor).
And I've used the information ever since in making choices about my life; I'm always aware of those aptitudes and I'm always thinking about how I can make use of them, whether in a job or a hobby or some other way.
That's the rational side of it. But most of the big things, well... I took this bus, I drove this car, I got on this train, I walked down this street, I turned this corner... and life sort of happened, and I floundered around until I found my place in wherever I'd ended up.