8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: career change

Chapter List

  • Poise Purpose

    Three years prior to writing these words I was on the brink of a huge professional change.

    I’ve made a lot of excuses for that change over the span of time that followed it, but it was locked in step with the topic of this category of writing: finding purpose and keeping ones poise, and the side effects of failing in either or both.

    This isn’t a self-help blog, but it is very much the reflective writings of a guy who burnt out hard at his career because of a lot of big ideas that are in lockstep with both professional poise and purpose: that for many a job is a job, your salary could always be higher but you get the work done—but also that for many of us finding meaning and an honest life in our work can be an essential part of the balance.

    Burnout follows when that balance fails. And that balance is more precarious than ever when one pursues work that is already heavily skewed towards purpose and meaning, like creative pursuits, and away from salary and strict process, like creative pursuits.

    That doesn’t need to be a fatal blow to those efforts. At least, I think so.

    Under the category of Poise & Purpose I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Yes And

    As I write these words I am contemplating an opportunity.

    I don’t write about it much here but the fact is that I don’t work full time. We saved. We picked hobbies and interests that are relatively inexpensive. We cook at home. We budget. And as a result we can live on a single income, our savings and a pretty modest pay that comes from my sporadic and occasional work. It’s a dash of privilege with a dose of planning. And I’m not apologizing.

    But it does mean that sometimes that occasional work comes in the form of something strange and interesting that throws a wrench into the simple routine. Like: I got a call asking if I would like to go travel for a week to do some contract work.

    Of course I would, I replied. 

    And so as I write this it seems pretty likely I’ll be packing my bags and going on a long trip to do some real work, shake some hands, and bumble around a place I’ve never been before. It would certainly be a change from my usual drudge of local cafes and my home office. 

    One of the rules I gave myself when I scaled back from full time work was to always keep myself in a state of yes. That is, if an opportunity (such as this one) presented itself, to start from the word yes and allow it to take me where it would.  

    Because here’s the the thing: not only would it be easy as a guy spending his days in pursuit of a creative second career to say no a lot, to hunker down and shut out the world while he pounded away on his keyboard as I pushed forward on a project, but it could almost certainly become the default.

    And yet, there is something inspiring, motivating, and genuinely creatively reinvigorating about a change of scenery and meeting new people. 

  • Hard Change, two

    (Continued from Hard Change)

    Change is hard.

    The one thing you never really understand the gravitas of until it body slams you down to the ground of your own ambitions is that there is struggle at every level and with every step.

    I have been crossing the bridge of change for over two years as I write this having left what many would consider a cushy government job in search of something with far less bureaucracy and far more agency to do work that was (for lack of a better way to put it) morally and creatively positive. There are a thousand and one nuances to that statement and a career spanning twenty-five years stacked with as many successes as struggles, but in the end the yearning for something greater than being a cog in a machine won out.

    And what I have I learned is that so few respect that struggle. Those still on solid ground almost unanimously reject the very idea of crossing a bridge to something new.

    The other cogs in the machine often seem resentful.

    Those yearning to have their turn in the machine are often scornful.

    And the many who reject the machine itself are distrustful of anyone who ever participated in the machine at all.

    I stepped out of the machine to find a purpose for the second half of my life that was far across that bridge of change, invisible on the other side, though something of which I had heard through rumours might exist. What I suspect is that the bridge itself might be so long that the crossing of it is the destination itself.

  • Hard Change

    Change is hard.

    Until I went through the work of trying to rebuild my career from scratch I spent a tremendous amount of time looking across the bridge of that change and imagining what was on the other side. 

    Before I spin this little essay into a retelling of a whole “grass is greener on the other side” idiomatic fallacy of yearning, I will clarify: I think that yearning for change can be motivated by all sorts of things, and yes, visualizing the future state of your life in a positive way is one of those things. I also think there are a lot of reasons that people seek change in their lives and none of them are entirely right-thinking nor entirely wrongheaded, either. 

    Change is motivated by many things and each of those things is shaped by personal circumstance, individual and unique as fingerprints, combining the notions of our histories, our dreams, our hopes and our fears. And more so, I think that if you were to ask anyone to fully explain their motivation for change they might look at you with a distant stare and struggle to fully explain the deepest of those impulses to cross the bridge into something new.

    I have been walking across my own bridge for over two years now and I still cannot quite see the other side except in whispered rumours and hints of something interesting when the fog occasionally shifts and my vision clears long enough to look. It’s a hard walk. And an even harder one to justify to those still standing on solid ground.