At 23, after living in my first apartment for a week, still fresh at my first real job, I came home from work one night at about 2:30AM (I worked a 4PM to 2AM shift), sat down on the carpeted floor in the middle of my living room in the dark, and asked myself, "Is this all there is, for another 40 years?"
Having fought depression while in college, I knew that I just needed to pour myself into industriousness. I worked incredibly hard, moving to a daytime shift, going through two title changes in a year before saying goodbye to it for an adventure working in London. I worked hard there, partly just trying to carve out my own niche when things were slow. For about a decade, I carried some kind of electronic leash and was on call in one way or another on a pretty much permanent basis. I think that I’ve clung to work in many ways because I could tell myself, "No matter how bad it gets, if I’m still showing up to work, I must be OK." I’ve made myself invaluable at work, and barring a specific vendetta, I’d always be the one you’d keep around even if there are layoffs, so I’ve really never had to really worry about being able to make a living.
I’ve recently undergone a change in responsibilities at work because I felt like someone else could do at least as good a job or better at my role, and that there are things for which my expertise and passion could be better leveraged. I’m still in the process of that transition, and the most interesting thing to come out of the process was the kernel of finding out what "gets me up in the morning". That process was both the beginning of what I consider to have been a personal breakthrough, and the result of something I’d been building up to subconsciously.
I’ve been feeding my head for the last few years, fairly incessantly, with audio books, podcasts, online and dead-tree articles of all sorts, and a few dead-tree books. Some of the subject areas? Educational courses on history (Civil War, Industrial Revolution, the history of various sciences and various aspects of mathematics), political theory, philosophy, and language. Malcolm Gladwell’s books Blink, Tipping Point, and Outliers (MG is better as audio than text, I find). Thomas Friedman’s Flat books, Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. Books about the reasons for flaws in human judgement. Podcasts about science, technology, entrepreneurship, language, business, security, and politics, in addition to those that bring me the Old Time Radio with which I relax. I watch the English-language Chinese channel CCTV9 sometimes, or CurrentTV, when I get fed up with the "science" and "history" on the Science and History channels. I’ve sought out material from a variety of disciplines, and let it all wash over me.
I’ve felt an incredible thirst for knowledge. And I’ve had a rising feeling that I was headed somewhere good with it. In the last 6 months, I’ve found my brain working differently — when I’m doing my best level of thinking, I’m summarizing concepts into symbols, distilling them to their essence, and even begun to visually arrange them in my head. It may sound a little strange, but it’s like I’m participating in the junior league version of how John Nash’s visualizations of mathematics were presented in A Beautiful Mind.
Having lost some weight this year, I recently started testing my blood sugar again, to see how I was doing with the diabetes I was diagnosed with at 21. While I’m not yet ready to say that I’ve beaten it completely, my blood sugar’s now usually not maple syrup, like it was even a few years ago. I don’t know how much of the change is due to what I feed my mouth, and how much what I feed my brain, but I do believe it’s both.
What does it all mean, though?
I came across this tweet from Ani Difranco at the end of June.
If ‘art’ is why you get up in the morning check out the new Ani poster contest w/ @creativeallies, details here: http://tinyurl.com/2djubyw
Why do I get up in the morning? I looked at the contest entrants, and I thought, "What I really love about Ani isn’t depicted in any of these. When I think Ani, I think about the way that she’s so incredibly into the music she plays so hard she’s always breaking guitar strings." There’s an essence to her that I wished I could reflect in an entry of my own. Visual design isn’t a strong point of mine — historically I’ve been far more auditory. But I realized that the art part of what I wanted to do was the kind of passion I feel. The art is in seeing and sharing. It’s in giving perspective to the world, sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly. I feel now something I’ve never felt before, an understanding of purpose.
It seems that the biggest changes in the world come from changes in perspective.
When I’m explaining ideas with radical changes in perspectives, people often ask me if I’ve thought about being a teacher. I get excited not just by ideas, but by redefining problems in terms of what I think their essence is, and integrating ideas from various disciplines to present non-traditional solutions. I try to simplify the explanations in the same way that I simplify them in my head, reducing components to symbols to relate concepts. Wonderfully compatibly, it’s also how I find imagery for my writing.
What’s going to get me up in the morning, when it comes down to it, is something that lets me effectively both create and share the understanding I have of the world to give back in the form of perspective.
It’s good to have a litmus test, though it doesn’t tell me exactly what to do — I have to figure that out for myself. In order to get any credibility, I’ll have to produce, but damn I’m feeling capable and ready.
5 years ago, I put the following in an online dating profile.
I want to experience life with someone who picks it like fruit from a tree and sinks her teeth in, juice spraying all over, but it makes no difference, because she’s laughing.
Now I understand that I have to be that person. With a sense of purpose, there’s happiness in striving, even in failed attempts. Screw failure, though. Now I know what’s going to keep me trying until I succeed.
What gets you up in the morning?