2015. I’m a little late for posts about new years resolutions, but I feel like that’s what this is. Maybe that’s what every post is when you take a long time to write posts—a post about how you resolve to write more posts.
Grad school sucks the life out of you when it comes to writing for the sake of writing. That and I don’t want to write diary entries just to write diary entires, or some glorified thought collection journal about how I feel about feelings. Yet, I suppose that when you’re a writer, you should write, no matter what it is you write about. I mean, truth be told, you don’t have to feel like writing to write. Most of my better stuff was written when I didn’t feel like writing. All three of my books were written while I was doing another full-time job. The first two were written while I was doing baseball and finishing my undergrad. When you have that much going on, you rarely feel like writing. So why did I? Because I was ambitious and wanted to say I did it all at the same time. I thought, someday, when baseball washed away, I’d be able to tell some employer someplace that I did it all simultaneously and they’d be gobsmacked and throw jobs at me.
Well, that moment has arrived, and they don’t care.
A dilemma I’m facing—one that my MBA is contributing to with each passing class—is I keep going to job interviews and getting turned down because I’m what job interview experts call “overqualified and under experienced.” I have all these great accomplishments, but all of them have come outside a corporate scene. Most of them have come in self employed, “be your own boss” scenarios, which HR reps see as a problem. They think it shows I’m unmanageable and won’t be okay with taking orders. If that’s true, in one year, I’ll be all those things plus a masters degree. Tack onto that me studying for the PMP and looking to learn a code language and, goodness, I may never get a job!
People say, “why don’t you keep writing. You’re so good at it. That’s your job!” Well, sometimes it is. Most of the time it’s a thing I can do. For starters, how good I am at it is subject to interpretation. Second, writing is something you don’t get paid a lot to do if you don’t have a favorable and consistent interpretation. Third, writing, like almost every other “be your own boss” job I’ve ever done in my life, is a what-have-you-done-lately job. What I’ve done lately is write the last book in a trilogy, about life in a sport I’m three years removed from. What’s next for me?
I’m not real sure I know. I have two or three half finished books lying around here… Hopefully one of them will get done. Hopefully, they don’t suck.
The nice thing about writing is, I can do it at anytime, in tandem with something else. I actually feel better writing when I have something else. Takes the pressure off. I just need something else.
My MBA was supposed to show me that something else, but I don’t know what part of the business world I want to be in. All I can tell you right now, however, is I don’t like accounting, and statistics was hard. Beyond that, everything I do like, I’m not experienced enough for (international business, strategy, organization leadership).
Sometimes I feel like the MBA was a mistake. Maybe I should have went into sports management. Or public relations. Or coaching. Actually, sometimes I wish I was in coaching. Not pro-ball because that’s just a grind, and I’ve pissed off so many professional managers (with only a two week stay on TBS!) I’d probably never make it to the bigs. But college ball would be great. I’d love that. I could write, be seen as an asset to a team and a university and help young men get their bearings before hitting the real world…. Heck, why am I not coaching?
Oh, yeah, because you have to volunteer, for free, for a year or more to even get a sniff. And it’s very politically driven. Head coaches go by word of mouth and who they like, rarely by resumes. Still, it would be a fun, which is saying something since, right now, looking at all the possibilities I might get form my MBA, none of them seem fun. None of them seem like they’ll offer me a good work/life balance.
But maybe that’s asking a lot. I spent the first 33 years of my life playing baseball, writing books, and covering sports on television and radio—virtually none of those things were real work. Maybe my expectations for enjoying my occupation from here on out are all unrealistic?