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I picked up the perennial bestseller (10,00,000 copies!) of What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers on Sunday. The top line of the cover lists this version as the “Hard Times” Edition. Seeing that made me wonder, again, why in the world am I doing this, when so many people have been out of work for so long? It’s a question I dismiss quickly. Despite the inherent fears in jumping into the great abyss of an unknown future (well, it’s all unknown), I know this to be the right thing to do at this point in my life. So, in hopes of a good conclusion to this journey, I’ll document some of this process.

In What Color is Your Parachute, author Richard Bolles lists a few sites for career quizzes. While I’m fairly knowledgeable about who I am, what I can do, and the type of job I’m looking for, I thought I’d give a few of them a try. The very first test, all of twenty-four, very easy to answer questions, pegged me. If you’re looking to be told what a good career path might be for you, try the Princeton Review’s Career Quiz. Here are my results, if you’re interested:

Your Interest Color is BLUE
People with blue Interests like job responsibilities and occupations that involve creative, humanistic, thoughtful, and quiet types of activities. Blue Interests include abstracting, theorizing, designing, writing, reflecting, and originating, which often lead to work in editing, teaching, composing, inventing, mediating, clergy, and writing.

Your usual style is YELLOW
People with yellow styles perform their job responsibilities in a manner that is orderly and planned to meet a known schedule. They prefer to work where things get done with a minimum of interpretation and unexpected change. People with a yellow style tend to be orderly, cautious, structured, loyal, systematic, solitary, methodical, and organized, and usually thrive in a research-oriented, predictable, established, controlled, measurable, orderly environment. You will want to choose a work environment or career path in which your style is welcomed and produces results.

Careers from The Princeton Review Guide To
Your Career linked to “Blue” interest:

If you know me, I know what you’re thinking.

• Doesn’t he already have a job? Yes.
• Does he like his job? Again, yes.
• Does he like the people he works with? For sure.
• Do they like him? I think so.
• So why is he asking for my help?

In approximately two months I’ll be moving to the Dallas/Fort Worth area. As to the reason why, let’s just say my last few years suffered from a blue-screen-of-death and I need to CTRL-ALT-DEL my life. (I don’t think it’s coincidental that I also became a Mac convert during this time). And, fortunately, none of that was as a result of my current job. While I leave this church with a sad heart, I leave on good terms.

I currently do not have a job lined up. This is equally exciting and terrifying. This is also the reason for my request. While I plan to do my due diligence in finding a new position, I’m also humbly requesting your help. Ideally, I’m looking for a position working with words – proofing, editing, or writing – but if you know me at all you also know I have experience with graphic design and layout, videography, and some web work.

Feel free, at any time, to send me contacts you may have in the DFW area, or companies you know of that may be a good fit for someone like me. Use the contact tab on the left side of the page to email me. Alternatively, connect with me on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Finally, if this is the first you’ve read about this upcoming change, I apologize for not having told you sooner. Don’t take it personally. If you need to talk some sense in to me, you’re always welcome to buy lunch for me.

In watching the first season of Breaking Bad two years ago, I sat transfixed by this small, strange, intoxicating universe of characters and experiences I knew nothing about. Even though they inhabited a vastly different world, their motivations to do some absolutely heinous things seemed all too familiar.

Breaking Bad follows Walter White, high-school chem teacher, cancer patient, and part-time meth manufacturer.

Read the rest at RelevantMagazine.com…

Allow me to quote a quote of a quote:

“He was a frail, sickly child, afraid of many things. So he stayed inside his house a lot and read books, mainly adventure stories. One day he was reading a novel by the English author Frederick Marryat. In his autobiography, Roosevelt records what happened:

‘In this passage the captain of some small British man-of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough, it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it.’”

In context (The Art of War for Writers, to be precise), author J.S. Bell is talking about feigning fearlessness in the face of the daunting tasks of living a writing life, to act as if you are one until you become one. Author Steven Pressfield would call this manning your station, day-in, day-out, so that the Muse will find you hard at work and reward you as such.

And while this is helpful and true and beneficial advice, I read more into it.

The warring parts of my soul (some might even say the Jacob hovering above my right shoulder and the Lockeness Smoke Monster hovering over my left) answer the conundrum of feigning fearlessness differently.

Smokey answers: Your bad habits? The things you despise about yourself? The things you always want to change but you never seem to be able to shake them? You’ve been feigning godliness for a long time. Your pretense is not your reality. I know what’s real. You should just give up.

Jacob answers: I know what’s real. I can see behind the facade of your charades. I know your heart, your will. You have, actually, been feigning godliness for a long time, but that makes you just like all the others. And to see that you still try, despite the short hand you’ve been dealt? That you keep pressing on and pressing in and pressing forward impresses me. Don’t forget that. But don’t let it go to your head either.

And I answer: I used to be afraid, and because I was afraid I became numb. When the world changed and I was shocked back into feeling reality, I barely held on. I almost lost my grip, but I kept feigning fearlessness, and now that fearlessness… it’s almost real.

The iPad releases into the wild this Friday. I don’t have one… yet. I’ll most likely cave and get one in the not-so-distant future, even though I have a difficult time justifying the expense. However, Kindles and Nooks continue to intrigue me because of their size and portability, even though there’s nothing like the texture, smell, and look of a physical book. I’ve (surprisingly) staved off buying an ebook reader since they’ve become commercially available, and I’m glad I waited, because the iPad, for a comparable price given its extensive capabilities, does things like this:

So the selling point for me is the iBookstore, and magazines like Wired that are going to make full use of the iPad’s capabilities.

And, just so you know, my birthday’s in a few months.
A milestone one at that.
Just saying.