Site news.... and processing serious mixed feelings

First of all, the open call for blog authors is still in effect. I've invited our first author besides me, also an INFP, and I'm eager to read what she writes -- in particular, to learn about career issues in her part of the world, and how they're different from here in the US. So that's what's coming up soon.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to write here, just post a comment and I'll set you up.

Now to those mixed feelings. I'm still very excited about the degree of autonomy that my day job is offering me, enough to feel night-and-day much happier than I was a couple of months ago. I even moved!

But I still have a consciousness that coding all day just isn't my calling. It's a lot more manageable because I'm only doing it 30 hours a week and I can take more frequent breaks or arrange my day how I wish. But it's still like... well, I'm not sure how to describe it. I can make myself focus for certain periods of time (maybe 2-4 hours, tops) and solve a technical problem that needs to be solved, but it requires a Herculean effort to stay on task. It's satisfying when I grind it out, but only in the sense that running several miles might feel satisfying when you're done with it.

I'm also getting a little antsy wrapping up a task, because I feel like my boss really doesn't even know what I'm doing in the day-to-day. He wants to see daily deliverables, which would be fine, except I'm not sure he really understands when the task calls for some sort of research and troubleshooting that doesn't show up on a nice neat Web page. To be honest I'm not really sure how much he understands about technical management.

I dunno, I still think I'm in the wrong career. Fortunately all that work done to choose a new one isn't for naught, as I'll be able to start putting together grad school apps around August-September.

The poker's going quite well, incidentally. I'm playing about 15-20 hours a week and winning at a rate that would be pretty good for a temp job. I'm not yet ready to take the plunge into playing full-time because I like having insurance paid for, I like not worrying that a week or two of downswing will sap my motivation to play, and I like knowing that I have some experience to put on the resume. But if something were to happen to my day job, or if I wanted to leave to take a contract job here where I'm living, it would be nice to have my poker bankroll pretty stable and being built up week by week.

It's true: Boring work really does dull your brain

See this AFP piece: Dull Tasks Numb the Brain, Literally

Not sure what the practical implication is, except that maybe I'm right to believe that I'm right to flee boredom at work rather than wishing beyond hope I could embrace it.

Maelstrom

It's been a really strange week, with a mix of eager anticipation about finally shaking up my routine and paralyzing fear about shaking up my routine. I was hoping to talk to my boss about an idea I had, but.... well, here's what I posted on a message board:

*sigh*

I'm about to try to bring this to a positive resolution by approaching my boss about going part time and off-site. I think that will address most of the frustration that I feel from working here and free up a good deal of time (and loosen some geographical constraints!) so I can do more things I want to do.

However, I'm a little scared of this conversation too, even though I'm emotionally prepared to accept the outcome all the way up to getting terminated. So it's taken some emotional effort to prepare for this conversation....

TWICE so far this week! And my boss still hasn't shown up in the office! Grrrr. How can I get this stressful conversation behind me if I can't even find him? Perhaps I should just send a resignation email. Arrgh.

So that's what's adding most of the stress in my life. I totally forgot to show up for a shrink appointment on Monday despite four Google Calendar email reminders! I was so wound up thinking I might have that conversation on Monday, and then so relieved when it didn't happen.

Last night I happened to make a sarcastic comment to my Mom to the effect that, "Of course God wants us all to be miserable for a few decades then die." At least I think it was sarcastic. My point was that society acts like we have a moral imperative to just keep clawing away at something we hate, in my case in a town I despise, and that for us INFP types that's just bad advice. But it still comes wrapped up in all sorts of normative statements from well-meaning but wrong-headed ESTJs.

Mom replied something about how I need to be more grateful for what I have, which is probably true but still set me off as a total invalidation of my self-expression. At that point all hell broke loose and I just reacted out of anger. I'm not proud that I treat people like that but it still gives me a lot to think about. Is my problem that I don't wake up every day all happy-go-lucky about a job that sometimes feels like torture (not lately, mercifully)? Does being thankful for life mean that I have to just suck it up and pretend to like where I'm living? Apparently, to people who think like Mom, it does.

I was just born ill-adapted to the human race, and that's all there is to it.

It's back

That same depressing ennui has returned. My mind is just so understimulated right now. I feel like I'm just voraciousy running around the Internet looking for something, anything, some bit of novelty to hold my interest for 15 seconds and get me that much closer to the end of the day. It's awful.

I am trying very hard to make progress on the informational interviews. It's a little hard, though, because I feel so burned out by 3:00 pm that the last thing I feel like doing is chatting with someone during my breaks. But it's really my only hope for a ticket out of this hell so I'm trying to be good about it.

Why won't my counselor let me just quit? I have five figures saved up in my rainy day fund / poker bankroll now. Probably not enough though. You can never have enough. You must continue pursuing more until you die. That's why you're human, ADHD, and INFP, so you can fucking be miserable until you die.

To reward you for reading this nonsense, here's a cool link someone posted on GlobalChatter, a list of different people's self-assessed job satisfaction by type (although it seems to know I'm INFP and give me only those, hmmm): http://www.typeandculture.com/typeresearch/ .

Career counseling session.... err, V: Winnowing

Yesterday was my fifth phone conversation with Debbie my career counselor. I would have previously labeled this session 4B, meaning that it was the second half-hour piece of the fourth hour out of the six that I've paid for. However, we only went for 15-20 minutes before she assigned some work for next time and ended the meeting, in essence declaring it a success. So I guess I'll go back to just counting the sessions normally, using Roman numerals to signify this switch. I'll also try to track where I stand in the six hours of meeting time; this session was from 3:30 to 3:50.

We were able to finish early because of four words I uttered, words that don't come easily but are always sincere: "I'm ready to commit."

My last several tasks have been about narrowing down this immense list of careers that I think I would enjoy. It's plainly impossible to pursue everything, or even a good slice of everything. For this fifth session my assignment was to do a fair amount of research on some of my top options, which had the practical by-product of forcing me to allocate my time among them. So I made out what I called my "visceral" top six:

1. College career counselor
2. Market researcher
3. Professor of org. behavior
4. I/O Psychologist
5. Non-profit manager
6. HS career counselor

I proceeded to look through job listings and other resources for each of these six, but with a strong bias toward those at the top of the list. I scribbled my findings into a Google Document, and Debbie and I perused my research job by job during our phone conversation.

As we worked our way down to the bottom few, it became clear that I was really just going through the motions. I'd emotionally attached to the jobs at the top of the list, actually the one at the very top of the list, so it seemed fruitless to invest a lot of time in pressing forward on all of them. So I said it: "I think I'm ready to commit to the top career on my list, college career counseling." And apparently that was a good answer, because we talked a bit more about how to move forward, then wrapped up the call after 20 minutes.

Even now as I type this entry, my MBTI "perceiving" trait is flaring up in full force. I feel almost guilty for ruling out the ones at the bottom of the list. What's wrong with being a non-profit manager?, I'm asking myself. Nothing, of course. The whole purpose of this exercise is that nothing's wrong with the 2nd or 5th or 100th choice. I just can't pursue everything at once.

The next step is to figure out what degree is most helpful for pursuing these jobs. Since there's no obvious right answer, or at least I can't find it on the Web if there is, I'm going to need to contact people in this field to talk about how to break in. In essence I want to keep two steps ahead, thinking both about school and about how to build relationships to help in my job search after school.

But at least I made a decision. I think I should feel proud.

A very lame entry

Need stimulation.... badly. Blue Valkyrie is about to die.

No joke -- sometimes during the day I just start clapping my hands because I feel the incredible need to do something. I'm sure my coworkers must wonder what that's about. A saner alternative that I've tried a couple of times is to bring in a few poker chips to stack and play with, but they became such a conversation piece that I stopped doing it. Maybe if I just used generic chips instead of real casino chips from my collection....

Actually, it's more interesting to sit here and ponder why the couple of coding tasks I could be doing don't get me more fired up. I mean, I have evidence galore that coding just isn't what I should be doing, so in some ways I'm gilding the lily here. If someone tells you Career X isn't ideal for you, and wouldn't you prefer Careers A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J?, it's sort of silly to invest more time thinking about why Career X isn't ideal.

But still, I like some things about coding, and self-knowledge is valuable, so I sit here pondering why I can't get started on these tasks. Blame the boss is way too easy, but I really think it's because I have no clear priorities set for my time. I know that I used to perceive one of these projects as really important; then it became clear that my perception was "misaligned," and so I stopped thinking about that one for a few weeks. The other one is just finishing up some work so we feel like we're getting our money's worth from a vendor, but frankly, it's a feature that won't have a dozen users by the end of its season in a couple of months. It's very hard to motivate myself to do either of these.

Why software isn't the worst possible career for me

In a message to a fellow INFP approaching career change, I wrote down a few thoughts that I think are worth posting. The premise is that I like some things about my present field, software development. In fact I like just enough to keep bringing me back to it, even though another career would probably be better suited.

As long as I'm learning something new, actually software is kind of cool. I can think to myself, "Wow, so THAT's how that works!" But when it comes time to plow my way through coding something that's not new or innovative, I lose patience very quickly and have no focus....

Making a change is hard and risky. I've been just unhappy enough to blame specific bosses or to otherwise think that my next experience in software will be the one that fulfills the potential to excite me. Now I realize that it's far more likely that I just need a career change.

Of course it hasn't helped that every time I've contemplated a career change and attempted to act on that contemplation, something really bad has come out of it:

• My disastrous experience marketing for the "Christian" college in which a rather sadistic boss fired me after a few weeks despite the dean's (her boss's) assurances I had nothing to worry about.
  
• My entry-level social services job, where I realized that individual contributors can't do much in that field without at least a masters.
• Applying to business school with the idea of specializing in non-profit management, only to have my star recommender disappear on me leading me to give up the whole thing in disgust.
• That abusive "ministry internship" that had my boss, a missionary whom I had earlier respected, screaming at me never to do ministry.

So much negativity. Sigh.

Therefore, it's repeatedly seemed easier just to shut my mouth and plod on through with the software work. At least I know I possess the skills. I just don't possess the motivation, not for more than a few months at a time.

It's hard to have faith that this time, the transition will be smoother.

CC3: Fresh ideas, renewed enthusiasm

Yesterday was my third one-hour phone session of six with my career counselor. I came out of that very enthusiastic and excited about writing up a post about it, but in true INFP+ADHD form I got busy with other things and am only getting to it now.

The first session was mostly me telling her my work history, and the second was largely her reading and "interpreting" the fancy reports from the MBTI, Strong, and 16PF. This third session was the first one where I felt like her role was to really provide substantial amounts of new information to help me pare down my list of prospective careers into something manageable. She also helped me assess the steps that would be necessary to pursue each one.

Per her instructions I had marked up the page from the Strong with the ten top careers, highlighting the aspects of each role that would appeal to me. I had also done some written exercises on values, work/life balance, etc. After this third session, I've pared my prospective careers down to four:

Marketing: This was a suggestion from Strong, "Marketing manager", that i had thought about but not really taken seriously. I'm really warming up to this because I'm finding that I enjoy learning and thinking about how to use Web analytics, and that's clearly a marketing question. If I go this route the obvious next step is an MBA. It's worth noting that some of my efforts on that horrible abortive effort to apply to business school back in 2005 could be useful here; for example, I already have great GMATs. Debbie stressed that I would need to be sure to get an internship, rather than just assuming that the degree itself would be sufficient to help me break in. She also suggested focusing on the international aspects of marketing in light of my cross-cultural interests and skills, which I think is great advice.

Non-profit management: After publishing the first draft of this post I realized that I left out another topic we had discussed briefly, non-profit management. I think it probably involves the same career path as the marketing, i.e. an MBA, but perhaps with a different mix of schools.

School counseling: This is an old favorite, one of the Strong's ten, and still a very viable one. We didn't talk too much about how I would get there, but I gather it would involve getting at least a masters in some sort of education or counseling program.

Special education: This was another of the Strong's ten. Honestly it excites me less than the counseling and seems to have a lot in common with it, although I'm not sure why it excites me less. I love teaching, and some past experiences with special-needs adults have been extremely positive. Debbie mentioned that in this field, there are so few males that my sex would probably work to my advantage. It's a viable option, but probably the least exciting of these four.

Organizational behavior or industrial/organization psychology: I first mentioned OB as an academic subject that fascinates me. I suppose it would involve getting a PhD in business, and then becoming a professor at a business school or perhaps some sort of consultant. I don't know a lot about OB as such, but I sit around thinking about questions like, "If Scott Adams knows enough about what's wrong with Corporate America to ridicule it in Dilbert, and if all his readers viscerally know that he's on target, then why don't corporations fix these obvious problems?" Stuff like that.

IOP was Debbie's suggestion after I mentioned OB, and the more I look into it the more it intrigues me. I found the USN&WR list of top schools with that specialization, although I could only see the top three without paying to register. Michigan State, Minnesota, Bowling Green -- hmm, a very Midwestern flavor. Is this just to improve the productivity of manufacturing workers, e.g. in the auto industry, even as their jobs go overseas, or does it also apply to knowledge fields like software development, law, whatever? Unclear, but that's one thing I'll be researching. Alas, it does appear that you need some undergrad psych courses to apply to grad programs, so I'd have to work at making up that deficiency. So it seemed natural to lump OB and IOP together.

So I came out of the conversation enthused about several ideas. My task for the two weeks until our next talk is to research some of these careers.

Wanna read something simultaneously heartbreaking and infuriating?

Check out the number of threads on the ADDForums career forum that are essentially the same theme: I have ADHD, somehow I didn't fit in the paradigm expected in my job, so I got fired.


Now, lest you think I'm just endorsing whining, no, I don't know the specifics of every situation, and I don't know those where some accommodation could have been made versus those where the person wasn't fit for the role in the first place. But I do know from first-hand experience that Corporate America is basically organized on the principle that, where the individual is incompatible with her work environment, it's 100% incumbent on the individual to change or leave. The corporation never adapts its hours, performance evaluation, work culture, etc. to the needs of the individual. (The only exception in the US that I'm aware of is where the individual aggressively demands accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a lot of ADHD people are reluctant to make these demands for various reasons.) I could be unfairly projecting from my own experience, but what I read there makes me think I'm not. Maybe there are a couple of individual-friendly corporations, and maybe like Google they get to pick from the top 0.01% of available talent, but those are very much the exception.

Anyway, I'm still slogging along in an ill-fitting career, but reading that forum makes me realize how much worse it could be. At least they're not trying to fire me (yet).

CC2: Answering a lot of questions

I haven't blogged here for several days, for a couple of reasons. Mostly it's that I'm less inclined to write when I'm not suffering, and I've been working hard on leaving my career dissatisfaction to God and coping with the suffering (but not denying it!). That seems to be going relatively well.

Likewise, moving forward with the counseling has really helped. I still have issues, and indeed, the counseling is only confirming my impression that I'm not in the right career! But at least I don't feel so desperate to make something positive happen right away. I feel more inclined to trust that I can wait it out, because I know there's a plan in place to improve things. Some of my fellow Christian friends might see that need for a plan as a lack of faith. Perhaps.

And finally, despite the inadequate feedback where I work, I've gotten better at picking up on small bits of positive feedback. That makes me feel better about myself and feel valued here. Even though it really isn't a good long-term fit, it's a lot better for people like me to go to work every morning when we feel valued.

So then... about the career counseling.

I had session #2 yesterday, and to be honest it was more about Debbie reading my results to me than anything. I took the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the 16PF. I come out as:

• An INFP on the MBTI (strongly iNtuitive and weakly Introverted, moderate on the other two).
• SAE on the Strong
• I can't tell you what on the 16PF, but it certainly makes me sound emotionally unstable.

One of my favorite contrasts is that the 16PF gives me low potential for leadership (3 of 10), but one of the others indicates strong leadership potential. I think that reflects my ambiguous view of leadership: I love to motivate others to a common goal, but only if it's an authentic goal. I have no inclination whatsoever to be a bureaucratic middle manager, or for that matter senior manager.

I've been reading up on INFPs. I love this INFP profile from Typelogic. However, this one from personalitypage pissed me off with this graf:

INFPs do not like to deal with hard facts and logic. Their focus on their feelings and the Human Condition makes it difficult for them to deal with impersonal judgment. They don't understand or believe in the validity of impersonal judgment, which makes them naturally rather ineffective at using it. Most INFPs will avoid impersonal analysis, although some have developed this ability and are able to be quite logical. Under stress, it's not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst.

However, the more I think about it (and about how MBTI defines "thinking" versus "feeling"), the more I realize why I'm so challenging. I'm not a typical F! To the contrary, I'm very good at logical thought. I just grow less enamored of it with each year of life experience, so I value logic only in situations that call for it. I think I come up F because I'm becoming more of a person who values feeling, even thought I'm still very capable of thinking.

In fact, I think this cuts to the heart of why it took them so long to diagnose me with ADHD. I've always done superbly in school, whereas most people like me can't focus on school. I guess it's a great reminder that four letters don't define who I am. It does remind me of my evil plan, with my best friend in college, to blow up the Greek system and replace it with 16 co-ed frats based around the MBTI.

In other news, a friend sent me a link to a careers-related blog, which led me to this fascinating NYT article about law and medicine being less prestigious than they used to be. It's a great point; in general our society values stability less than in the past. Maybe I'm well-positioned to gain in prestige as a vagabond -- as if prestige meant that much to me anyway.

But all is not lost....

Actually, last couple of days I had forgotten that I had a rush of things I wanted to learn more about in my spare moments here, possible career stuff. Things like, can you take an undergraduate course in organizational behavior? (Some places, like U of North Texas, you can. Now to find one in a location that appeals to me, and preferably in an extension school.)

It sucks that I don't get enough from Web development to keep me going emotionally, but you gotta make your own stimulation, I guess.

A couple of careers to pursue

As I've embarked on career counseling the last couple of weeks, I've compiled a list of every even remotely viable career that catches my fancy -- not because Debbie asked me to, but just because I think it would be fun. Here they are. I'm sure there are more that I'll add as I think of them:

• Faith-based outreach worker / "missionary"
• High school guidance counselor
• Teacher (HS, MS, ES)
• ADHD coach
• Career counselor
• Professor of sociology
• Professor of youth ministry
• Professor of organizational behavior
• Poker pro
• Tech manager (dev. or QA)
• [Web] marketing manager
• [Web] marketing consultant
• Management consultant
• Professor of political science
• Professor of economics
• Non-profit manager
• Lawyer / legal advocate (for ADHD, for privacy e.g. EFF, etc.)
• Author
• [Documentary] filmmaker
• Political writer/blogger

Productive Thursday

I came in this morning determined not to repeat my unfocused yesterday. And mercifully, I can still do this for short periods of time. The first 1:15 of my day, I've been pretty focused, largely cleaning up some messes that have been screwing up our database.

I'm trying to quit a lot of the Web surfing (or, let's be honest, looking to fill my intellectual stimulation deficit) but I am letting myself blog a bit, obviously, and did let myself read these two posts from the law school dropout poker guy: Deep Thoughts Part I and Part II. It's not really about poker, more about how you assess what social value different careers produce. Good stuff.

But You want a truly worthwhile job? The guy from Triple-A I had to call to start my car in a bad neighborhood in -10 degree temperature when I had absentmindedly left my inside carlight on. The sewer inspectors who wade through other people's feces from 10pm til 6am so that you can flush your toilet in the morning. The city's electrical engineers who are literally on call 24/7, frequently dragged out of bed at 3am to fix the power lines the evening storm had knocked out. But I'm sure as hell not going to face the shitstorm that would result if I took my 2 ivy-league degrees and accepted one of those jobs.

It's really too bad this guy doesn't still blog, but perhaps he resolved all the issues he felt he needed to.

Self-discipline

In abstract terms, I know that my life would supposedly be better if I'd stop surfing around the Internet looking for stuff to make me think during work hours. And indeed, I try to give myself rewards when I do settle down and focus, e.g. counting up the times I shut down unrelated Web sites and giving myself 20 cents per occurrence toward some book or something that I'd like to buy.

But the sad fact is, I don't get enough stimulation from software to keep me going. I get some stimulation, and that tends to create a mirage. If only I could work on cool projects, if only I could use the right technology, if only I could use agile methods, then I would be happy working in this job function. And over time, I've come to really question that. I think development is something that can be really cool in the short term, especially when it's done well, with unit tests and pair programming and such. Some ADHD people are good programmers, but their brain might not work exactly like mine. Maybe coding just isn't enough to keep me going.

What is?

Wednesday

Decent day today.... not too depressed.... also having the usual concentration problems. Really drives home how software is interesting enough to catch my attention at times, but not always stimulating to keep me going all day.

I'm finding some useful inspiration on that Christine Kane blog, even though it makes me slightly cynical. On one hand, it's easy for those who've gotten a break or two to just assume that life is like that for everyone, that everyone got that same break. On the other hand, there's a lot of truth to the notion that you have to put yourself in position to get that break.

I've tried to put myself in that position a few times (e.g., ministry internship.... working at that Christian college....) to get "that big break." It's turned out disastrously. But maybe I need to keep at it.

"You are in control, nobody else."

I'm not going to write at length about poker on this blog, but one of my thoughts has been making a go of playing live full-time.

In this post from the ironically titled "law school dropout's poker blog", I think he gets to the heart of doing what you love rather than accepting societal expectations for you:

I used to think that my dream job would be as a writer for The Daily Show, or some other smart comedy. Anyway, it just so happened that the executive in charge of original programming at Comedy Central is a graduate of my alma mater, so I used the alumni network to look her up, and send her a few letters asking if she might spare a few minutes to talk to me over the phone about work in the industry. (This was during my first year of law school, when I was just starting to get disillusioned with the whole enterprise.) I sent her a couple emails, and a letter by post, but got no response for over a month, so I figured they hadn’t reached or, or she was simply too busy to grant me an audience. So I forgot about it for a while. Then a couple weeks later, just out of the blue, she called me, catching me very off-guard, since I had more or less written her off. Because I was a little flustered, I bumbled awkwardly through some generic questions and answers, until we started talking about my ongoing law school education. In filling a bit of a prolonged pause, I lobbed her a softball, asking her what she thought of law school, and whether it could help in her line of work, expecting the standard “well, a law degree is so versatile, it would certainly prove advantageous no matter what field…blah, blah blah” response. But her firm and bleak answer took me by surprise.

“No,” she offered flatly.
“Oh…” I replied, somewhat caught off-guard.
“Well,” she continued “I just don’t really see what use a law degree would be in the field of comedy. I mean, I guess if you were going to work on artists’ contracts, or something, but that’s work for the law firms…doesn’t really have much to do with what we do here at Comedy Central.”

She didn’t speak with any reproach, and didn't intend her comments as a rebuke of any kind, but that’s exactly what it felt like to me. It was like an indictment of everything I was brought up to believe: that if you just study and work hard, everything else will take care of itself. That may indeed be a prescription for a life free of overt hardship, but I think it very far from a recipe for life fulfillment.

‘Of course law didn’t have anything to do with comedy,’ I thought (in many ways, it’s the complete antithesis!). ‘What on Earth could lead anyone to think otherwise?!??’

Her comments stung a little, but also carried with them a very important message; one that I had largely repressed until that time, but whose authenticity was undeniable: You are in control, nobody else. Deceptively simple, but it’s a message that has informed nearly every decision I’ve made in the past few years. Would you rather be playing poker than attending but ignoring a law school lecture? Then LEAVE, you’re not nailed down to the seat. Want to travel? Buy that plane ticket. Want to work on interesting projects? Well, you can interview for a position at a law firm and hope some interesting work finds its way across your desk once every couple of years, or you can decide what you want to work on and go seek it out.

It's really something I need to think about. Maybe I'm letting societal expectations keep me from doing what I love, or what I love for now. Maybe I'm letting the fear that I might not love it in six months or five years keep me from pursuing poker (or creativity, or something else) with all my passion now.

How the hell do you get a gig like this?

Christine Kane's tour schedule. Looks like she just goes around the country giving "Corporate Creativity Training". I mean, I sound cynical, but it's really a serious question, because I think I would love a career like that. So how do you do it? Get a PhD in creativity? Acquire years of experience becoming creative? I'm really serious. Anyone know?

I surfed over there because of an old link in my reader from the now defunct twentypercenter blog. I miss Max. He wrote some good stuff. I wonder why he took it down.

He linked to this post: How to live a life of quiet desperation. This one looks interesting, though I haven't read it yet: Wrecking your potential. And I might accept her challenge to list 100 things that delight me.

First CC session / Dreaming of excellence

I had my first phone conversation with Debbie, my career counselor, today over lunch. This one was mostly me talking, going through my resume with great candor. Honestly, it was a very difficult conversation, even though I'm happy this counseling is taking place. Moving the conversation from one personal failure to another is damned hard! I actually thought I might burst into tears a couple of times. She seemed particularly surprised that I had not followed through with the business school application process in '05. Well, it was surprising. I really felt like such a loser at that point that I was convinced I could never find anyone to write recommendations for me.

Next comes a battery of tests that I can take online, then another phone convo next week. I feel pretty comfortable with her even though she didn't do much talking today, so I'm going to pay for the whole package now.

Ironically, talking about all my failures made me feel less dissatisfied with my present job! Actually, it made me realize that I'm pretty lucky to even have a job after
this train wreck.

Driving home tonight I had an odd thought. Various times I've thought I should be doing something creative, and stifled that thought. The world doesn't need another mediocre novelist, another mediocre bassist, another mediocre sculptor, and without passion that's all i could aspire to. Then the odd thought: What if i actually dared to dream that i could be excellent at something creative?

What if?

Coupla links to explore

While just googling , I found a couple of things of interest. Actually several, but i don't have time to explore it all right now.

• blogcatalog adhd tag -- I suppose this is no different than Technorati or any other metablog site, but I should keep an eye on those.
• What really caught my attention there, though, is: Is there such a thing as an ADD-friendly career? I'll have to check out her "Best of" post for 2007 too.

I'm sure there's much on the Web to be discovered; like anything, the trick is separating wheat from chaff. I know link posts aren't that interesting but hopefully i can help in that separation process.

Career counseling starts today

Today is my first phone session of career counseling. The counselor, who lists both an MBA and MSW on her resume, tells me that she has experience working with ADHD people. If the session today works out, I will end up having a total of six sessions plus related testing, etc., for about $1000. That's a bargain if it ends up putting me on some reasonable path where I feel like I'm using my talents for some beneficial end.