A few weeks ago, my favorite Internet writer, Mark Evanier, launched a series of articles teaching aspiring writers how to cope with rejection. If you’re not familiar with Evanier, in addition to his popular blog, he’s been a successful TV, film and comic book writer for his entire career. So, he knows of what he writes when it comes to rejection. He’s faced and overcome a lot of it.
A career is something that fits into this sentence: “When I grow up, I want to be a ____.” A job is what you do to pay rent and buy groceries if and when you aren’t able to become whatever noun you ever seriously put into that sentence.
It’s entirely possibly to find one’s career while working through jobs.
Like Mark, I had dreams of growing up and becoming a writer and a filmmaker; and for many years I primarily made my living through writing. It wasn’t writing in the way I had always imagined I would be doing, but it was writing and I considered myself mostly as a writer, whether it was professionally for other websites that paid me a salary or if it was for fun on my own movie news and review website.
But, considering myself as a writer and thinking to myself that that was my “career,” I missed a large part of what was actually my true “career.” The only thing, though, is that my own personal career definition isn’t super well-defined. However, I am what I am.
And, what I am is an Internet guy.
The Internet didn’t really exist in the way that we know it exists until I embarked on my professional career. My first “job” was in the print industry; which I took while patiently also working away on what I thought I wanted my career to be: A professional movie screenwriter. But, it was also at that time that a friend got me involved in writing for his website, which I considered a hobby between the day job and the aspiring screenwriting.
However, after the print magazine went away and put me out of work, I got my first professional Internet job for a TV listings website and I struck out on my own at creating my own website, again, thinking it was just a hobby.
Since those days — we’re talking the early Aughts — up until now all of my professional jobs have been for Internet websites, most of which I thought of myself as primarily a writer for them, even though my “jobs” entailed all sorts of different things, including basic coding and asset management.
Also, over the years, while working on my own websites, I accumulated more and better coding skills: HTML, CSS, PHP, jQuery, all because I felt a drive to present my writing in the best possible way online. However, because I acquired all these skills on my own projects, that I now take on freelance work building and modifying websites for clients.
While I still enjoy writing — in fact, I’m writing this on a break from coding websites for clients — it’s not how I see my professional life anymore. Currently, my career has landed me as the team leader of an asset management team for the marketing department of a major entertainment company, I don’t do any creative writing at all. And I couldn’t be happier!
Turns out that asset management speaks directly to my strong organization skills and my super-laser-focused attention to detail. It’s a field full of strong challenges that I find extremely stimulating.
And writing code for websites? That’s not a career I could have ever dreamed up for myself as a kid, like the way today’s kids can and do. Who knew I would take to that so strongly? I never did.
So, here I am. I’ve had a pretty good career as an Internet guy. And the best part?
I still gotta lot of days ahead of me.