Pursue Your Pipe Dream With Vigor

I don't know what unfinished business draws me to collect these inspirational quotes. A friend of mine once said, "Jeff, you are in no danger of becoming an office drone." But still, I fear it. 

Maybe it's the kind of fear I should just embrace and be transformed. Or maybe it's the kind of fear I should continue to resist because I can only overcome by struggling to the very end?

I'm afraid I don't know. 

It could be that there's no one correct answer and life is not easily reducible into binary choices.

Anyway, here's another quote I read today and wanted to put somewhere safe:
"It is FAR better to pursue your pipe dream with vigor than to halfass something you took as a compromise."

--Kate Beaton

Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.

Insight on doing what you "like"

I don't know nothing about Paul Graham. He appears to be some sort of venture capitalist or start-up expert, or something. I haven't bothered to research him. But as I continue on my drunken path toward becoming a person who works for himself and accomplishes things, his essays give good info I don't find anywhere else. For instance, this excerpt from an essay titled, How to Do What You Love:

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Quote Marks

"Money can't buy you love, but love can bring you money."
-- Daniel James, CEO Three Rings
from an essay at Penny Arcade

Quote Marks

"Have no fear of perfection. You'll never reach it."
--Salvador Dali