Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Emily, a fellow former Googler who, like me, quit to pursue a different dream. In her case, she's getting another degree in preparation for teaching writing. She loves teaching, and currently does tutoring work for some kind of company that hires out tutors. I was thinking, this all sounds eerily appealing.
When I get back to New York, I think I'll look into possibly doing some tutoring work. I already know I'm great at that, and it'd be nice to have a little income, instead of living entirely off of savings. It's also an ideal gig if I'm going to work for any sort of corporation, because I won't have to interact with anyone in a corporate office - or at least not very much. And it's something I can do temporarily while looking for something in the nonprofit world.
It's amazing to me that these things don't occur to me naturally - I had to go to California and have lunch with an old friend before I could have the idea.
Then I had dinner with Mark, the brother of one of the people I'm staying with, James. We talked about career prospects for both of us, and it sort of reprized the whole issue. I can help other people in various ways, give them good ideas for their own direction - and by good ideas I mean ideas where they say, "oh! that's so obvious! Why didn't I think of that!" But for whatever reason I don't have the same caliber of idea when it comes to my own future plans. Even when I know I want to do something, I often find it difficult to identify the steps I'll need to go through. There always seems to be some kind of impediment, or some particular aspect I'm ambivalent about.
This is one of the things I admire about my friend Kar. Actually it's a small component of what I admire about her. She doesn't allow impediments to persist. If she's ambivalent about something, she'll just think about it and make a choice one way or the other. If there's something standing in her way, she'll just think about it and find a way through or around. She never takes the long way when a short way is available, and so she always has faith that however long something seems like it's going to take, that's the amount of time it's appropriate that it take.
It's an amazing ability, so simple in conception, but really it requires a raft of qualities that seem to have grown up naturally in her through the course of her life. For example, she has a clear sense of when something is a new problem versus an old problem; so it's easy for her to identify whether a situation involves things she's supposed to think through on her own, or if there's a government service or private company that handles that type of situation for people.
How do I learn how to do that? It seems like a function of spending a lifetime interacting with the world in particular ways, and developing a sense of what's out there. I don't have that sense to any great degree; but to Kar it just comes naturally.
Kar is highly admirable. They love her at her job, because if something is handed off to her, and it's possible to do, everyone knows she'll do it and it'll be totally right. She just thinks it all through, makes choices where choices are needed, eliminates impediments that crop up, and finds the shortest way to get everything done.
So yeah. Career choices. Ambivalence. Impediments. I know people who are so impeded that they can't make any changes at all. If an obstacle appears in front of them they behave like a child who is just learning to walk. They literally will just stand there, uncertain which foot to lift, and what direction to move it. And this will ruin their whole day.
I'm not at either end of that spectrum. But I would say that one of my biggest weaknesses is an unwillingness to address my own ambivalence in a practical way. I don't take steps to isolate it and reduce it to a simple choice. I think the reason is that I find my own ambivalence so fascinating. The idea that I could want two incompatible things; and the idea - or the faith - that if I just think hard enough about it, I'll be able to discover a way to satisfy both desires without sacrificing either of them. I do really have that faith. It's a faith in creativity; because so often I've found that seemingly incompatible ideas really aren't incompatible, if someone is willing to approach them unconventionally.
So I'm even ambivalent about ambivalence itself! Do I want to reduce competing choices to simple terms and make my decision about them quickly? Or do I want to use them as opportunities to challenge myself to find a way to incorporate both of them into the same solution? I can't decide! I don't want to decide!
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