One Cardinal

Taking on Risk

Mind

22 May 2011

Beginning June 30 I will not have a full-time job. It will be the first time since graduating from college that I will be floating free of a steady paycheck. But unlike those heady days when my partner’s job secured us a place to live, I now have a baby girl and a mortgage. Two of the biggest anchors people can lay in life, and that should make one entierely risk averse, willing to plod around doing work for work’s sake to make sure the college fund doesn’t run dry and you are not foreclosed on.

But looking around, while a steady job is nice, I feel more and more that I am not living up to my potential, and that is a frustrating and sometimes depressing thought. None of this is to denigrate my previous place of work. I loved the time I spent there and it has helped become a more open and thoughful person. The skills I built and the obstacles I overcame to do consistently high quality work have been invaluable, perhaps even more so than college (a subject for another article).

But I noticed a cognitive dissonance between what I was doing in my free time to have fun and what I was doing at work. While I majored in English in college, I minored in comp sci and have always been a tinkerer. I love to build things, the more complex the better. Modeling real-world systems into data that can then be teased apart and manipulated keeps me up at night. That wasn’t true about my previous work, which, while all the things I mentioned earlier, had become, in all honesty, something of a drudge — at least big parts of the work.

So where on Earth did this risk taking come from? I have not historically been a risky person. I tend to take a fairly safe path from one part of life to another, taking comfort in knowing that I can do something, rather than challenging myself with something I think I might fail at.

All of that changed, however, when I went to live in France for a year. As a teaching assistant, the French government sets you up with a fairly generous stipend for the amount of work expected, and you go live in a French town or city for an academic year. Sounded simple enough, and in hindsight, it seemed not that daunting of a task. But looking at it from the front-end, it was a major challenge. From landing in Lyon and taking a night train to Besancon, and meeting a colleauge I’d only emailed with and sleeping at their house. Setting up shop in a temporary apartment while looking for rentals. Negotiating a rental contract in a second language and making sure rent was paid on time and getting to my classes prepared. Locking the door on our rental for extended vacations to other corners of France or Europe, and most importantly doing that all with someone you are not related to and coming out stronger on the other end.

Yeah, our France experience probably had something to do with our boldness to set out and buy a farm in Coastal Maine, not necessarily a hospitable environment for new and working families. Or our decision to start a family a year ago with our first daughter.

And now the decision, after working for 4 years at a great company where people came first, to set out and find work doing what I love, is both scary and exciting. I’ve been doing basic software work for many years now, and each year I pick up more new tricks until I find that my code stacks up pretty well against other open source projects. Over the last few years I’ve even contributed back to a number of projects with not insubstantial contributions.

All that leads me to believe that while cutting lose is not easy, I’m also not going for broke. There are jobs I can do to get by, and that I could do if I had to. But for now, I want to focus on doing what I do when I have spare time, but this time for money. Because I can and life is too short to just do something to get by, waiting for an opportunity. You have to make opportunities for yourself.

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One Cardinal

Taking on Risk

Mind

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