Tell me about yourself.

[resonant]

I'm suddenly struck with the desire to know how other people do the things that matter most to them, how they find and follow their passions.

How do you decide where your heart is? How do you carve out time and energy to pursue it?

Are you on a new road or one you've been following for a long time? What have you learned that could help others? What false starts have you made, what poor judgments? What have you compromised, and what do those compromises look like to you now?

Comments

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

It's great, though very alien to me; my family is mostly made up of planners and risk-avoiders.

One thing I have learned, though, is that good things come to me when I pursue three things: curiosity, the desire to have interesting conversations with interesting people, and the desire to get better at whatever I'm doing. If I follow where those three impulses lead, and stop thinking about "career-building" or "networking" or whatever, then I usually find myself in a place that I like, even if it's a place I didn't know existed before I got there.

[20thcenturyvole.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I mean, if you have a career, especially doing something you love, then it takes up your life, and you can't think of your life in terms of business buzzwords, or your soul will shrivel up and die. If you'll excuse another family anecdote: my dad's hero was his Auntie Olive, a peripatetic teacher who used to go around the Aboriginal tribes of Western Australia. Her whole life, she never settled down or raised a family, but by the time she died she held Auntie (influential elder) status in a bunch of different tribes across Oz. Do what you do and do it well, I suppose is the whole point.