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]

I saw a need.

This is so much the key! It's something to be said for temp-service work, actually, and for taking unlikely jobs: if you don't know what to do, you can at least go and be someplace where you'll meet people, learn something, and possibly be lucky enough to see a need.

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

And also build a personal foundation of experience. The standing joke is "Everything I needed to know about dealing with Salesmen, I learned teaching kindergarten kids."

The two years I spent working inventory gave me the chance to teach myself tenkey by touch, something I've used on a regular basis, but also a feel for courier truck driver schedules and an affection for forklifts and the smell of plywood pallets and cardboard. I've since startled warehouse guys with my facility with packing tape and made friends by volunteering to file packslips.

In the last two weeks, I've given thanks that I took Physics 201 when it wasn't a required course, discussed the Scorpio Simpsons episode and the Ferengi Laws of Acquisition and the Turing machine.

What single corse of instruction, what degree plan can build that? Nope, but twenty years of bopping from video production to diaper manufacturing to high tech components taught me about manufacturing lines and JiT management and well...stuff I'd never have learned had I gone straight from school to a single company, or even a single field, and stayed there.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I've since startled warehouse guys with my facility with packing tape and made friends by volunteering to file packslips.

This made me think of my brief tenure in the mailroom, which is the reason why to this day I never get my scotch tape tangled up.

(Also, the one skill from journalism school that impresses people the most? is that I can write without looking at the paper. Not prettily, mind you, but I can write.)