When You Talk About - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/31/when-you-talk-about-music

If you're doing things right in your life, the way you should pick your job is by this basic standard. What is it that when you talk about it, you can just go on for hours and hour and you just can't stop. It's one of those weird things when you run into a person who loves their job, loves their field, or loves whatever they are doing, this is what happens.

The thing about this, is that you can't judge people for what they love because there's always going to be a person out there that loves something that you just can't stand. I'm an English person, I love English. I like words in a weird way, and I enjoy stories. It's what I love and can talk about for hours, and I can do math . . . but I just can't stand it. As much as I would like to roll my eyes at people that love math, there's going to be someone that does it.

This goes for all of the fields that are out there. You might not be able to understand why in the world they love it, but they do. The best time that I have ever seen this was when I had just gotten back from Sweden and got a dead end job working in the warehouse of Namifiers.

All that company does is do custom tee shirts, custom lanyards, custom name tags, and everything else like that. They specialize in making things that you never notice, but companies seem to be hyper obsessed about. For me, it was useless mindless work that did nothing more than pay for rent and some food as I mindlessly made name tags for companies that I had never heard of before.

Then there was my boss - Sean.

The man loved lanyards, tee shirts, and name tags.

Let me put it this way - the man dropped out of college so that he could work as a manager of a name tag company. He LOVED what he did, he had a passion for it, and it was his life. He showed up early talking about name tags, stayed late working on name tags, and his entire life was nothing but those stupid, annoying, frustrating things that he seemed to love. (Not related at all, but he got fired from that job and had nothing to fall back on because he had made Namifiers his life and had dropped out of college but that's a different rant for a different time)

The same goes for other people that I have met. Brandon Barth - great friend, amazing roommate, witness at my wedding - got the same look in his face when talking about the geography of the moons of Saturn. It was the most boring thing in the world to me, but to him it was the most interesting, fun thing to ever talk about because he loved it.

It doesn't happen all of the time, there's those people that pick their jobs just because it pays the bills and they want to be able to afford food, and then there are people that think that they feel this passion about something, but they chose wrong and are stuck in a field that they hate. But every now and then, when people get lucky, they choose a field that they love, something that even if they're bad in, something that they have little actual skill in, that they absolutely love.

Unfortunately/fortunately I'm one of those people. I am in a field that I absolutely love, but I'm seriously starting to doubt if I'm any good in the actual field, but to me, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me if I don't have a world best seller, I just enjoy the realm, and enjoy being part of the community.

Now for those people that were looking for me geeking out about music, and saying that music is something that changed my life and something that I absolutely loved and is part of me, and I could have done that, but I think that this topic is a whole lot better explained by the idea of people loving what they love, even if they're not the best at it.