Goals for My Life; What To Do With My Life

One of my favorite newsletters is from www.ITTYBIZ.com and today's entry "What Do I Do With My Life?" struck a cord. So I want to tell you my side of the story.

There I was at the beginning of the dot com boom and working with a mainframe. A mainframe is a computer. A really really big computer. I was a supervisor and one of my tasks was to evaluate various pieces and parts for a brand new local area network or LAN.

How I ended up in the computer field at all is still a curious question. My degree was in Human Development. I didn't even have a math class! Computers were something for really super smart people in the late seventies, not me. My friend's father always told us that computers were coming and that she and I should take a computer class while we were in college. I carefully avoided any math classes and didn't take any science classes that were even close to computers. Now I needed to learn about computers and figure out how to intelligently convince the powers above me that we needed to buy brand xyz.

As I was researching, programmers would tell me that I should go back to school. My manager told me to go back to school. Everybody said that I should go back to school and get my Computer Science degree. I thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that if I wanted to invest all that time in going back to school, why would I take computer science classes? My tiny brain told me that if I were to invest all that time, that I should take something I would love to take. Something that I would enjoy! ART!

What to do with my life had to revolve around ART. That is all there was and is to that. Why would I pay for anything else? What would be the point in learning something that I still have no desire to know about. These are the types of questions to ask.

If I could do anything in the world, what would it be? No barriers. If I didn't have to worry about money, what would I do for a living? What will drive me to get up in the morning and do something productive? What will make a positive impact on the world as it relates to me? How can I define and achieve my goals?

This is a process that you can develop over time. Define what you need to do with your life and then narrow it down until it is manageable - for you. Don't make hasty decisions. Learn from your mistakes. Get on the internet and explore some possibilities. Then re-evaluate. Then define your next step. Keep moving forward. That's the key. Move forward and do it for you.