What Do I Really Enjoy Doing?
A couple months ago I was frustrated with some work stuff. Some clients were hard for me to work with, some clients hadn’t paid on time and there weren’t enough clients to satisfy my meager financial needs. My frustration led me to make a list to answer the question “What Do I Really Enjoy Doing?” I put the list away after I wrote it and set myself a calendar reminder to come back to it a couple months later for review. The review date is today.
In between then and now I read my friend Gina Trapani’s piece called “How to Craft Your Personal Business Model.” The most interesting part of that article for me was a pie chart that showed Gina’s ideal work situation. The pieces of the pie were like so:
30% Learning, 30% Money, 30% Love, 10% Admin
I thought that was a good breakdown and it’s been on my mind as I’m reviewing my list.
So I’ve got a list and for the most part it’s arranged in order of preference though there are some serious ties:
- Consuming Louisville
- Studying Judaism (tradition, ritual, Torah, Talmud) & Hebrew
- Learning & study in general; teaching, educating in general
- Reading
- Baking
- Doing good for and in the community
- Encouraging and helping others do good
- Community organizing and connecting people
- Documentary photography
- Photographing: food, rural Kentucky, Louisville
- Teaching people about using technology for communicating (aka what we’re currently calling social media); helping them use that technology to make connections, build relationships and help people
- Promoting Louisville
- Organizing events (geek events like Let Them Tweet Cake, art events like the upcoming Heine Brothers exhibit)
- Promoting art and supporting artists
- Consuming smart media and entertainment
- General community involvement (boards, committees, etc)
What am I going to do with this list? I don’t know but it seems like I need to do something. My life is currently made up of all these things in a least some capacity but it seems like I’m just kind of treading water both career-wise and lifestyle wise. Some days float by and at the end of them I can barely do any sort of accounting of what I’ve done with my day. Some months the calendar page turns and I know that I’ve worked my ass off but the bank balance is so low and though I’m/we’re fine financially it bothers me so much. Sometimes I feel like I’m just not putting anything of value in the world.
I feel like I need to figure out some kind of model like Gina’s not just as a business model for work but essentially a business model for a life.
So again, I’ve got this list and no idea what to do with it. Maybe I’ll come back to it in another couple months to see if I have any new ideas.
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