Finding My Passion

This was originally written for the forums at The Road to 100k but I thought it I should put it here as well:

I can understand everyone’s frustration over finding their passion. I wanted to share my story to see if it might help someone else.

My trouble has been that I’ve always been the “jack of all trades, master of none” kind of guy. I’m interested in too many things, which means that I never achieve real competence in most of the hobbies/pursuits I take on. If you’ve ever seen the movie Rushmore, I have a lot in common with the main character.

Since I want to everything, I end up doing nothing. Which is why I never really picked a career field but bounced around from shitty job to slightly-less shitty job. That’s also why it took me nearly two years to decide whether or not I wanted to marry my girlfriend (who had a young autistic child), because that limited my options. After waffling for way too long I finally decided it was time to make a freakin’ decision and in about three years I’ve gone from being a bachelor renting an apartment to being married with a stepson, a new baby, and a house.

Around the time I was trying to figure out what to do, the original 5MWJ video podcast came out, and I tried to figure out my passion. I love helping people and I am a self-classified geek so I created a blog for personal finance from a geek point-of-view. Mixed in with the usual debt snowball stuff were articles like “Going to ComicCon on the cheap” and “Economic Lessons Learned from Firefly.” after a couple of months and two dozen or so posts the newness wore off and I decided not to continue the blog. Shortly after that I got my next “great idea” for a podcast that focused on local food production and locally owned businesses. I got two interviews, four episodes total, and about a half dozen people signed up for the forum when I had a bad turn of health and was in the hospital for almost three weeks. During this time and the few weeks of getting back up to speed once I got out of the hospital all my momentum died with the podcast.

When my wife was a little over halfway through the pregnancy we decided that it didn’t make sense for her to work since daycare for two kids would eat up her entire salary. Since we’re not completely debt free yet that meant that I needed to step up and take a second job. My dayjob is working in accounting M-F 9-5 farming a cube so I had to find something better than minimum wage that didn’t interfere with those hours. I started out waiting tables at a Sushi place but quickly managed to get a gig writing weekend posts for a huge blog. I saw a job opening on one of my favorite blogs for a weekend writer. I sent them my three best posts from the geeky personal finance blog and that got my foot in the door. After a couple of trial days I got the job and have been working there since.

Now I find myself with another problem – time management. I leave my house at 7:30am during the week and get back around 7:00pm and work from home for pretty much those same hours. Our baby is 2.5 months old so she needs a lot of care right now. I’m trying to power through and work on building a business, but it’s difficult. I’m sure many here know what that’s like. My wife feels like time spent trying to build a business is choosing to not spend the few free hours I have each day with her and the kids, so I feel guilty whenever I try working on my own business.

That’s why I’m in kind of a holding pattern right now. I’m hoping that by the summer we’ll be mostly debt free and I won’t be working seven days a week. If that’s the case I can have time to actually try and develop something of my own. I’m very much looking forward to it.