Designing Your Life – I May Be Lost Here
This is from my weekly email series, The Weekly Mixtape. I would appreciate it if you subscribe to newsletter. It makes me feel like I’m actually doing something with my life.
If I said that the last few weeks have been frustrating, that word would have too do way too much work.
It has been a beautiful summer out here in Colorado, the kids have been busy, we’ve had family visit, I’ve been putting in plenty of hours during this work from home environment, and things, on the surface, seem like they’ve been going well. But at the same time, so much has gone wrong. I don’t want to get into the why right now, so let’s just say it has been tough.
During all of this, I picked up a book called Designing Your Life by a couple of Stanford professors who teach a class at that school around the same concept (see my review here). I didn’t love all of the book, but it has a great underlying theme: do you even know what you enjoy in life? If not, figure it out, hopefully in a way that still allows you to live.
On one hand, this is the ultimate First World Problems book. The US is a very wealthy society, and the fact that we’re even able to think about what we enjoy shows how good we have it.
On the other hand, if you can get people into positions where they both do well and do something they enjoy, they’re going to do it better. It is very much in our own interest, as well as the interests of our employers, to find where we excel.
Yes, the extremes may be impossible (like, as they mention in the book, expecting to be a rich poet). But we can make tweaks to make things better.
Which brings me back to, well, me. I’ve been doing accounting for quite a while now. And in what would have been a huge surprise to an 18 year old me, there are parts of it that I very much enjoy. Yet I’ve been in a position where I’ve been basically precluded from doing the “fun” bits.
So for various reasons–way too many reasons to discuss here–I’m making a change. Depending on how the first steps go, maybe even a radical change. I’m working on designing my own life, and I’m going to see if I can make money focusing more on the stuff that I like about accounting and less on the stuff I hate.
I’m not quite ready to announce all my initiatives, but I’m hoping to get them up soon.
What about you? Are there any parts of your life that are absolutely dreary? Is there a way you can design your life to minimize those terrible parts and focus on where you really shine?
Service Dog Update
It finally happened. Wilson got neutered. And he’s pretty pathetic in his recovery.
Taking him to the vet was interesting. Since Wilson is training to be a service dog, we take him virtually everywhere (even, amazingly on a Ferris Wheel, where he did very well). So when I took him to the vet, he walked straight in. If anything, it was overly excited by so many dog smells distracting him from the job he was supposed to be doing. Which was, well, NOT smelling it all.
(The “Balls Off” project is supposed to help with all of that)
While we’re sitting happily in the waiting room, a dog coming in for her spay had to be basically dragged in by her owner. So the stereotype is real.
Wilson now gets to take a couple weeks off to recover from the surgery, and he isn’t happy about it. After a year of being with us almost constantly, we’ve had to leave him alone at home, the Cone of Shame wrapped sadly around his head.
He’ll be back at it soon. And we’ll get you more fun updates. Like maybe we can get him on a roller coaster next time. I’m sure he’d love Space Mountain.
