| I literally sat down last spring and focused on this problem with a bit of brainstorming and philosophizing. My goal was to figure out what parts of me added up to being a coherent whole as a person, at least w/r to career. (With other aspects, too, but mostly "what should I spend my time on, really?") And this kind of thing is never wholly about skills, interests and talent - they are starting places, but personality and natural tendencies were a much bigger factor in my judgment. And it helped. I found some insights about what I could/wanted to do, my personal principles, and how I might put these things together in the form of a career - like, ah, yes, I like teaching things and advising, but no, I don't want to do it in the form of formal education. And so on, probing different aspects of the process and teasing out what was most and least painful and working towards "mostly painless so that I can really focus on perfecting it". Then over the summer I tested out some of these ambitions and found where I was and wasn't limited - like, if I wanted to teach, could I do it by streaming? After working through the logistics I realized that I had something more like lectures in mind, which would communicate better as video. Then looked into video editing and polishing up my voice work and realized that I needed more than one format to do everything I wanted. So I decided that I would have a "multimedia blog" with writing coming first, but lots of images and supplementary content. So I started on that, and have posted a few articles and shared them(mostly with friends). I don't post at a high rate but it is proving to be a good way of directing my writing energy away from comments like this one(hmm...) Since the season has changed, I'm probably due to try evaluating myself again and looking for another way to inch forward and focus on what topics and techniques I'm meshing well with. |