How to Do What You Want
In Life

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The hardest thing in doing what you want is coming to terms with it. I’ve spent more than ten years doing that, maybe more, maybe since I was a little person? When I was young, my mother gave me a book to record my dreams. I never wrote down the visions that came to me at night, only what I fantasized about during the day. The themes don’t change over time. I’ve known for a long time what I wanted to do.

In many ways, I’ve been doing what I want, and in those positions and side jobs and experiments and activities, I’ve been circling closer and closer, around and around, like a bird goes about it’s prey. But quitting my job was recognition that, all of a sudden, the circle was getting larger, not smaller. I wasn’t closing in on everything I’ve ever wanted, but moving farther away from it. I needed a course correction, and I took it.

Since then, for two months or so, I’ve gone on a life break, a reset if you will. I exercise a lot. I read endlessly on the Internet. I sit on our stoop and people watch. I started drinking light wheat beers. I completed my best run, and then a week later, I did it three days in a row. We went on a vacation to Newport. I had my 30th birthday party, and another celebration for good measure.

I am more at peace, knowing somewhere I already made the decision the moment I quit, and now I am just preparing myself. There’s depression, and then there’s the overwhelming excitement of possibility, where your heart races and there’s nothing you can do to slow down. I’m not sure which I prefer. I try to temper my expectations. Other days, I strike down big goals from my heart. I tackle them in permanent ink.

If you could do anything, what would you do? The responsibility is big. Or so we believe. Most of us can do anything we choose, but we don’t because of perceived limitations. For the past two months or so, I have been stripping those limitations from my view. I have been trying to erase paradigms, or understand them, or feel comfortable wrestling with them because they’ll never go away, not completely.

Like, for example, when people asked what my next step was, and I said “I don’t know.” That’s not a good thing to say unless you want to make people confused and uncomfortable. Or later, when I knew, and I said, “I’m a writer,” the reactions are very different from when I mentioned “I’m in marketing,” or “I work for a startup.” I still do those things. But first and foremost, I’m a writer now.

Mostly I am coming to terms with a different financial reality. Because I want to make money, and I am pursuing what I want in the absence of money. This makes me confused and uncomfortable. But media is an industry in enormous flux, both risky and thrilling, where beloved institutions crumble and new ones are built in just hours. More than anything I want to be in the fray. Writing is a constant sifting and winnowing for the truth. That which allow us to make sense of our lives. And there’s a lot of sense to be made.

I want to build a space for dialogue to engage and challenge our ideas and institutions. I’ll investigate how to find meaning and make money in our work and lives, even as inequality rises to staggering heights and highly educated young people remain jobless or underemployed with debilitating debt, even as we live in a lesser depression, even as partisan politics reaches all-time highs and corporatism sinks to lower lows, even as we struggle with sexism and insidious ignorance, even as we feel the problems piling up around us are too big to solve.

Now is the time where I stop circling and make the dive.