It’s Work Just Thinking About Work

I seem to be hav­ing tremen­dous dif­fi­cul­ty in get­ting any­thing done that makes me any mon­ey. I hate to think that my dis­dain for mon­ey runs so deep that it com­pro­mis­es my abil­i­ty to do things I would enjoy if I weren’t mak­ing mon­ey from them.

We fin­ished Cool Beans! about a week ago, and I’m very proud of the work that I did on it, and of course pleased with every­one else’s work but the uni­verse revolves around ME here in my own jour­nal. So there. I think this issue looks good. At the same time I’ve had pro­gram­ming work to do for weeks that would allow me to pay my rent, and I’ve resist­ed doing it again and again until the first of the month is with­in spit­ting distance.

I can tell I’m not sim­ply lazy because I bust­ed my ass for the Cool Beans! design and type­set­ting. I put my all into it, even div­ing into the CD stuff­ing with focus and vig­or. Yet I can’t bring myself to work for mon­ey. Why is it that I seem to have a choice between doing work that I’m good at and enjoy, and work that makes me mon­ey even though I’m not par­tic­u­lar­ly good at it?

I mean, I’m hav­ing trou­ble com­ing up with a rea­son that any­one would pay me to do pro­gram­ming work. I’m not a pro­gram­mer! And the more I have to do it, the less I like it. It used to be a fun hob­by, and now it’s a real chore. And a chore for which I have plen­ty of expe­ri­ence and no train­ing, so I could be doing every­thing dead wrong. Yet I keep on get­ting away with it.

Design and pub­lish­ing though, I know what I know and what I don’t. I can fake many of the things I don’t know, but I also know where to look and who to ask to find out what the tra­di­tion­al­ly cor­rect approach is. Basi­cal­ly, I know what I’m doing. It feels right. I get things done and there are good results. This is of course satisfying.

But it does­n’t make me any mon­ey. I don’t make mon­ey from doing what I’m good at. This just makes very lit­tle sense to me and I don’t think I’ll have it fig­ured out any­time soon.

I think that the struc­ture of a «real» job, with a work­place envi­ron­ment and every­thing, would do me a lot of good. I’m a bit afraid of the restric­tions that would place on me, but I’m dri­ving myself crazy as a free­lancer when I’m not will­ing to do any work that pro­duces income.

I guess it’s back to the job search. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that ter­ri­fies me as well. The last few times I’ve done a job search, I’ve come up com­plete­ly emp­ty-hand­ed. Net­work­ing and using con­nec­tions has got­ten me pret­ty much every job I’ve ever had, and search­ing for a job has just net­ted me big fat rejec­tion. Of course, this is just what it says in What Col­or Is Your Para­chute but what am I going to do? not put my resume out there? I’ve got to do something.

Maybe I should sleep some­time too. =^)