Picture from here

Money isn’t everything. We treat it like it though. Some people can’t understand when I say I don’t necessarily want more though. I of course do want more money, but at the same time, I don’t. What I truly want is more freedom, more time, and more enjoyment from what I do.

I’ve had a couple of jobs that I enjoyed more than anything else. The first was working at a small PC shop. It was my first break into the IT industry, in which I’ve done well climbing the ladder. I interacted with people, I was a problem solver. I was one of the go-to people that could fix almost anything. I’m the type of guy that you throw problems at and I’ll swat them away like annoying insects. It was my forte, the only thing I was really lacking at the time was high-end networking. I could make computers talk, but as I learned in my next favorite job I truly knew nothing.

The next job I can say now that I truly loved was working at Symantec’s enterprise firewall support call center. Like the small PC shop after a year or so, I came into my own and had my own groove. After three years of being on the team I had closed more tickets than anyone else in level one and level two support (I left being the team lead). I also held the record for the most calls handled in one day. The irony about having the most tickets closed is that 30-40% of the time I didn’t even open a ticket for the call. Our call center software was so slow that it took 5-7 minutes to actually open and write up a ticket. I made a deal with my managers (I’m sure some higher-ups wouldn’t be happy) – that if I could handle the call in under five minutes and be almost positive that they wouldn’t be calling in on the same issue I could just skip the ticket process. So for volume, by the time I left, I handled far above and beyond what everyone else had ever handled. Symantec has since discontinued the product, it lasted about another year and a half after I migrated into consulting and it went kaput. I wonder if anyone caught up to me in the call record or the number of handled cases before it was gone.

This isn’t about bragging rights, I’m sure it sounds like it though. What did both of these jobs have in common though? They were both hectic chickens running with their heads cut off problem squashing affairs. I work best where I have a new issue every fifteen minutes or a nagging issue that would keep me up at night trying to solve it. As you move up the ladder you lose that. You are working on long and engaging projects where the problem takes five minutes to engineer, yet in turn takes six months to implement. I’m still good at what I do, but it’s not exactly the best fit for my skill set. This in turn leads me into a spiral of more money versus more enjoyment.

I had a conversation with my grandfather a few weeks ago, he told me how lucky it was that I had a job in today’s economy (I am) and that it would be difficult to move up in the area I lived. I started to explain to him that I could more than likely find a better-paying job, but it may not be as stable in the long term as my current one. I also said for the right job I would work for less than I currently do. Somehow in his mind, that didn’t compute. In an abstraction of what he said, essentially he thought climbing the ladder should be what is important. I told him with the right job, I would take a 20% pay reduction. Granted that wasn’t my end goal, but for the right job in the right environment, I would take my family down to the bare level where we could maintain everything. Why? I would be happier.

We are taught early that you need to learn so you can better than “random example”. So you can go to college and maintain that edge and not be a janitor. So you can get a huge house and be better than your neighbors. If your neighbor buys a Lexus you are taught that you should buy a BMW. It’s a mad dash to prove that you are better than everyone else. To prove that capitalism runs the world. If we are not working to that we are either considered un-American, stupid, or lazy. Granted I am a bit lazy, but I can work. I was born July 4, 1976, so I don’t consider myself un-American (I’m a Constitutionalist). I’m not stupid either.

I think this mindset first hit my family when I wanted to go to college for music performance and creative writing. They always said I wouldn’t make any money with that. I was seventeen and brave enough to say that if I was happy I could be living on a street corner in a box as long I was writing and playing music. They never understood that. If I didn’t have my wife, and a love for electronics (I didn’t have that love back then), I could probably still do it. My life hasn’t greatly changed at the core in the last decade though when I was first with my wife. We live essentially the same way, we have a few nicer things, a house, a car payment – but our basic lives are still the same. I’d say the greatest difference is that we can not stand hamburger helpers anymore. I still eat the occasional cheap-ass boil-it ramen, and she enjoys Kraft Macaroni and Cheese still.

Too many people in this world work for money. Money is needed to survive (I have a friend that would argue that), but at the same time, it shouldn’t be your singular goal. When I was younger I had a certain goal financially I wanted to make, which I did through different means. I’m not at that level right now (I have no stock options to sell anymore), but it didn’t make it me any happier. These days I write more, I play in two bands, I’m learning new instruments, and I have a baby that should arrive in the next couple of months. I’m juggling the things that make me happy with work, what if I could be blissful with my job too? Some days I hate my job, most of the time I’m just meh. If I could get the hair pulling problem solving hectic life going again it would be great (must be my undiagnosed ADD). If I could do it at the same pay level or better, that would be awesome.

I really need to get some more recent pictures of myself