Crisis? Confusion? or Negative Self Indulgence?

Posted by E-George on August 31, 2008

This has been a time fraught with reflection and, pardon the cliche, soul searching.   Not so much regarding having a baby or being a parent.  That is its very own compartmentalized panic attack that I only take out and play with when I’m overly tired and know I won’t be able to control it.

No, what I’m talking about has to do with my professional career.  If one could call it a career.  It’s really been more of a series of dares and dumb-luck payoffs that demonstrated whether or not I had  the guts, curiosity, capability, tendency, or vague skill to blob a solution together and pass it off as a success.   I’ve always felt conflicted, though between what it absolutely takes to be mad-dog-style successful and whether or not my real passion lies along that road.  Then, there’s the compounding conflict about what my real passion is.  There was one time when I thought I knew what my passion was, but I was helped, shall we say, to see that pursuing that passion was impractical.  So, in seeking out that which was practical I found myself on a strange, circuitous road lasting these 10 years.  Reflection of those 10 years I can see giant doors and windows of opportunity for advancement or education that I somehow idled past or convinced myself weren’t appropriate for me at the time or even simply ignored.  Now, with all the embarrassment that hindsight provides, I’m kicking myself for not making the sacrifices then that would be helping me now.   I’m 31.  Only just marginally competent.  No degree. No real prospect of being able to complete the engineering degree I started.  Not sure if I would be capable of finishing an engineering degree.   Not sure if I want to. Not sure what it would gain me, except the possible obligation to stay in the workforce.

The crux of the matter is that I find myself increasingly frustrated that, no matter how hard I feel and believe I am working, no matter how much comprehension I try to apply to the work, the reality is that I’m always 10 steps behind where I need to be in order to secure complete success.  I keep finding myself in a terminal loop of asking myself where I belong:  Do I want to stay in the “technical” field? If yes, why aren’t I making the “correct” decisions to do what it takes to be successful?  If no, what do I want to do?  What am I even qualified to do?

To be successful in what I do (or nominally do, I should say), I know exactly what it takes and here it is:

• The heartfelt desire to spend every waking moment learning about the work.  How to do it.  How to do it better. How to do it best.
• The single-focused drive to sit in front of a computer all day at work, all night at home, and throughout every hour of the weekend reading, practicing, trying, learning, searching to the near-total exclusion of all other things.  One could describe it as rooting around the internet like a truffle pig, and like the truffle pig, doing it because it is what I am trained and like to do.
• Replace reading for pleasure with reading for education and restocking the nightstand with applicable technical books.
• Foregoing personal relationships or the maintenance thereof in favor of learning how to do this work, because socializing interrupts the flow and application of study.
• Acknowledging that this is a permanent, ongoing behavior pattern that cannot be interrupted or slowed.   It is a permanent fixture of my future until the day I retire from the workforce.  (Moreover, it should be an example of how I should approach all other endeavors that may erupt along the sidelines.)

Now, here is the fully-funded-retirement question:

• Is it worth it, to me, to take those steps to be the best at my job?

And, here’s the follow-up 25%-return-on-investment question:

• Am I lazy, a loser, or a quitter if the answer is, “No.”

Career crisis?  Hardly.  Career confusion with a small dollop of negative self-indulgence is probably more accurate.  I have to get to the bottom of this, and soon.  Currently, I am far too dependent on smarter people than myself to ever advance on my own and it this dependency dangerously strains those relationships.  It’s got to be career-style fish-or-cut-bait time within the next year or so.

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