Monday, December 14, 2009

What don't I love?

I don't like to hate things... I don't like to be a whiner or complain endlessly about stuff, so hopefully I can do a brief, logical inventory of stuff I am not good at, don't like to do and never want to do again.

sales or telemarketing
customer service
answering any sort of "hotline"
reporting numbers and data
tracking things like the effectiveness of marketing plans or ad campaigns
attending sales meetings
looking for needles in haystacks

I know that I am an impatient person, cannot spend hours and hours looking through records or files or compiling data or whatever; my attention starts to wander quickly, I get surly and actually start to experience light-headedness, nausea, headache or severe hunger. It can utterly blow the rest of a day. Well-meaning folks have sometimes complained (ahem) about this particular personality trait, and all I can say is, I have never had any control over it. It's not that I want to "get my way," or that something has to be entirely about me and what I like... I just am not the kind of person who can DO that. Even with things I do like. Dyslexics often say they feel physically ill when confronted with a page of music notation, or even in severe cases just a page full of words, so I can't imagine that my "affliction" is an indication of a major character flaw; it's just an honest brain quirk.

Another quirk (let's be generous) is that if I have a job, it has to be meaningful to somebody or I become increasingly despondent, unengaged and utterly lose interest. It doesn't even have to be relevant to my situation personally. If I can contribute to somebody's quality of life, I'm good. It makes my time mean something. If it's just sales of something completely irrelevant to that basic quality of life, fuhgedaboudit. For example, being a relay operator for the deaf - that's hugely relevant to major quality of life issues for a poorly served population, so I'm incredibly happy doing that. Additionally, writing for Premier Guitar combines my two major passions, so I love that as much as I love breathing. Being able to write for Premier Guitar while between relay phone calls is perfection. On the other hand, selling consulting services to institutions that contribute enormously to the debt load of a population just getting a start in life, no thanks... couldn't do it no matter how hard I tried.

The other thing I'd like to work my way around is the whole making-megabucks-for-somebody-else-and-getting-paid-squat-to-do-it thing. That sucks and I don't ever want to do it again. I think I would be okay with making megabucks for me, but would need to try it to find out for sure.

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