I want to do what I haven’t done for decades now – find or create a better career by making myself accountable for figuring it out until I do it.

I’ve made so many excuses up to this point about why I haven’t put in the time or effort. Even after my first semester of law school, I had doubts about whether the law was for me, but when my mom asked me if I had any other plans, I did not, so I ended up finishing law school, debt and all. After law school, I looked into this and that about other (traditional) careers than law and eliminated myself (rightly or wrongly) from further consideration of them for one reason or another. For example, counseling sounded interesting, but I don’t think I have the emotional intelligence required to be one nor the extraversion that seems necessary. Something I know about myself is that I’m extremely introverted, meaning that being alone gives me far more energy that being around people – I currently work full-time alone remotely (like a dream so far – I am looking for a similar situation!) and enjoy it immensely. Problem coworkers are usually the worst part of any job, for me. I’m looking for the type of job at which I can excel and that plays to my strengths and not just any alternative career.

I even found out about a fantastic aptitude test that cost $600 that confirmed my feelings (and the facts) that I was not cut out for being a big law or traditional lawyer – being more of a generalist, but then didn’t really spend time on acting on the rest of the results. But at that time, I was also doing a lot of volunteer work for fun and personal interest that ended up becoming a nonprofit job I loved – I thought I was living the dream then too, but then reality came crashing down on it when I quit it traumatically due to an inappropriate boss I could no longer work with.

So after that, for more than 10 years, I spent my time avoiding the issue of finding a different career because I just didn’t want to go through the same thing again and I just didn’t see any other immediate good options. I knew what I didn’t want but not exactly what I did want and what I did want was just too undefined. How can you completely eliminate the possibility of having to leave a job because of the stupid decisions of another person? That’s a tall order because any job with that level of autonomy is not typically entry level or you have to be your own boss – another form of instability I had no idea of how to manage.

And money becomes a distraction – because money is always at the forefront of your mind when you leave a job or path for money related reasons – not only do nonprofits not pay as well as for profit or government, etc., I was in a job that was so niche that there weren’t any other jobs in the field that I wasn’t even interested in or to which I could easily transition. So I kind of have a fear of over-specialization too.

One thing that kept coming up in my aptitude test was writing – whether “as a career in itself or adjunct to whatever else you are doing”. Funny enough, I have always wanted to write a book, but I’ve never wanted to “be a writer” – that just sounded to pretentious and artsy fartsy. So I have had ideas about what I might want to write about – all nonfiction. I thought about writing a critique of off-putting evangelization or biographies about my family. Maybe I have it in me to do these. But what I don’t have is the habit of writing.

So, two things motivated me to (finally) start a post today. 1) listening to the podcast that came from a blog “A Slob Comes Clean” and 2) James Clear‘s book Atomic Habits – probably the best self-help book I’ve ever read. More on that later.

When I got frustrated with my failure to find a direction career-wise, I decided to abandon the search and focus on other aspects of my life, like relationships – remember the title of this blog! I “accepted” the failure and changed course. After I felt I had through to the ends of one thing, I turned to more and more (personally) challenging areas of my life, like decluttering my belongings for self-organization (which is what A Slob Comes Clean is about), and then during the pandemic, my health, which involved reading about nutrition, teaching myself how to cook – and become a better and better cook, which will be never-ending since I hate cooking – and learning about weight training from a personal trainer. Disciplining my diet and exercise has been and is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and do now. Maybe next to finding the right job.

But if you look at the blog , the whole premise is of just doing the thing – blogging as a means of accountability and writing at the same time. Which is exactly what I need to do about my job search. So, my goal is to do what she did – to write every day, even it’s to report I did nothing. I love that her second post is six sentences, which I’ll copy here in its entirety – “I know it’s only the first day of this, but I need to get going. Here’s what I’ve done today. Cleaned up kitchen – not perfect but lots better. Picked up and vacuumed living room. Folded a load of clothes. Whew.” Love it!

I fully expect to “fail” again but hopefully to fail forward. Maybe my second post will be worse than hers – that I didn’t do anything at all (again). Or the negative thinking that I’m blaming for not doing anything – but that’s starting to sound like an excuse. Or writing down the excuse that shouldn’t be an excuse to document what I tell myself in order not to do things. Maybe a bit of shame to negatively myself by having to report what I did instead of writing – like what Netflix or YouTube video I watched or music I listened to that day when I could have been writing (horrified emoji)! Maybe this will also a practice of acceptance, observation and non-judgment. And how many times it takes for me to report not doing something for me to do something. Or what a more reasonable posting schedule is – although that is starting to sound like an excuse too. I think James Clear would say that even showing up with a single sentence is better than nothing! At least report the failure and write something about it!

So my goal is not to write a post as long as this every day but to hold myself accountable for practicing my writing, just doing it. The “goal” is to develop new habits – to make writing a habit a la James Clear – and to make spending time and mental energy on the job search a habit. He talks about systems / habits over “goals”. To even prevent myself from editing in favor of practicing. For example, I was tempted to look at my past posts and make some kinds of edits to the blog to organize what they have to do with what I’m doing right now but I think I need to just skip the perfectionistic impulse and just start something new without worrying about whatever else is here. I can mess around with tags or whatever later after I get this writing done first.

So as my non-excuse of the day, let me say that for day one, I woke up in the middle of the night for some reason, and after an unsuccessful attempt at sleep, I decided this was a great excuse to drink some coffee and start the writing today!

If I have leftover energy or thoughts for the next post, I will start on the next day’s post :)!

Lol. After writing all that, it was all planning and not the actual documentation of what I actually did on my job search because I didn’t do that first! Smh.

But happily, my first two minutes turned into forty minutes of looking through five pages of online job openings in my city of interest, clicking on jobs I wasn’t even interested in to see what kinds of duties they required and making the following list of likes and dislikes.

Likes

Investigations and analyses

Working with information e.g. library, data

Educational, recreational, cultural interests

Dislikes

Working in emergency situations

Working with the general public

Working in the criminal field

Inspection and maintenance or enforcement of rules on physical objects, whether inanimate (parks, infrastructure) or animate (animals, humans)