I’ve been reading the book Quitter by Jon Acuff (affiliate link). It’s a book about how to connect your day job and your dream job and Jon’s story of going through eight jobs in eight years, which he doesn’t recommend. It’s really less about “quitting” your job and more about taking advantage of the opportunities you have, while you still have a day job, and building those opportunities into your dream job. Essentially giving you a steady ground to land on if you do ever make that leap.
I’ve not been reading this because I plan to make such jump. I actually enjoy getting paychecks from people other than myself. I’m mostly just fascinated by his story and all the challenges along the way. In case you don’t know who he is, Jon is the guy that started the Stuff Christians Like blog, which kind of took off pretty well and has allowed him to write a few books and get tot he point to where he has his dream job and is working for Dave Ramsey.
At any rate, the point is not to review the book right now. As I’ve been reading it though, it’s helped me to re-focus on things that I love doing and seeing opportunities that I may have missed before. The book talks about reclaiming our dreams. The things that we loved as kids growing up. One of the things for me has always been writing. When I was a kid, and especially a teenager, I wrote all the time. It didn’t matter what it was. Stories, poems, songs, all of it. I remember writing a “book” when I was in 3rd grade. I remember it was called Mystery at Shadow Mountain (yeah, I’ve always loved mystery stories too). We had to fold our paper and half and write in it so that it actually looked like a book. Give it a cover picture and title. Staple the crease. I’m not sure what happened to that book, but I’m pretty sure I’d give one of my toes or a pinky finger to get it back. Stephen King probably has it in his den figuring out how he can turn it’s 10 or so pages into a 800 page book.
So, for the past month, I’ve been getting up a little earlier and made sure that I’ve written something. Since February I’ve been writing for Frisco Fastball, a San Francisco Giants blog, and my job is to write recaps. I can write other things, but I’m the person who is telling all about whether the Giants won or lost that particular night. Writing recaps is not really that fun or exciting. But after realizing that I was not enjoying it, and starting to slack off, I decided to actually give it the time it deserved. For me, that meant getting up by 7:00am so I had a good hour before I had to get ready for work, rather than waking up, rushing to get ready and then pounding out the game recap in 5 minutes. It’s still not the most fun thing, unless the Giants get a good win, but it’s getting easier because I’m taking the time to do it.
I’ve also picked up a site I had mostly abandoned, Monterey Insiders. I originally set it up for other people to do reviews of places to eat and things to do in Monterey. Those people never did anything and I did very little with it. So in the past month, I’ve picked it up. I’ve written about places I routinely go to, so that makes it easier and I have set a goal for myself to have one review every day during the week at 9:00 am. Writing reviews is also not the most fun thing, but as the couple of weeks have progressed, it’s gotten easier and more fun.
So, I’m now finding myself at a place of where I am writing regularly. It’s not the most exciting writing, but it’s getting me in practice. That practice has allowed me to find other opportunities and set aside more time to start writing stuff that I enjoy writing. A couple weeks ago I had a chance to interview Karl Ravech, host of ESPN Baseball Tonight. Tomorrow, since Baseball Tonight is coming back to San Francisco for this weekends game, I get to interview another host, Wendi Nix. They’re pretty standard, routine kind of interviews. They are promoting the fact that Baseball Tonight is going to be in town and need bloggers to get the word out so fans will show up to be on TV. But, they’re still bigger interviews than I’ve done with anyone and these people (hopefully) get to see what I wrote about our interview. Not a huge deal, but fun all the same to say that ESPN contacted our blog to interview one of their hosts.
Suffice to say, I’m writing. I’m not writing much here, but I hope that changes soon as I restructure some of my blogging outlets. Writing makes me happy, especially when it’s not a 10 page paper for a graduate class. Tomorrow I’m hoping to write about some of the tools I’m using to help me write and remember things to write. We’ll see how that plan goes.










