By Paula Kiger

1994 found me at the right place at the right time. An organization that I had followed literally since its birth in 1990 needed an Operations Manager to oversee functions that included customer service and other critical areas. The organization’s focus is the administration of a federally-subsidized health insurance program for children. The program has grown virtually in lockstep with my own daughter, who was born about 18 months after I joined. By 2008, both she and the program—which I also loved unconditionally—had developed from toddler to teenager.

In 2006, as our Third Party Administrator (TPA) contract was ending, we started the procurement process for a rebid. A TPA in our case handles: the computer system for insurance enrollees, along with eligibility, payment processing, correspondence, and customer service, i.e. pretty much everything. The contract went to the lowest bidder, who also had scored the most poorly on the assessment tools. As a staff member, it was not my place to question why it worked out that way, but simply to make it work. As the person overseeing activities related to customer service, I was centered firmly in the eye of the storm as the transition from the old TPA to the new one unfolded, with problems galore. (All transitions have problems, but these were worse than “average” and I was the one getting much of the feedback from unhappy enrollees and legislative offices).

Several months into the transition, a typical day would find me with 20+ emails open, each one interrupted by an even more pressing crisis. My seven staff members were valiantly trying to figure out a convoluted system that had not fully matured, while fending off hostility from our partner agencies, who were also awash in dissatisfied enrollees and important stakeholders complaining that their constituents were complaining.

The day I broke, I had the 20+ emails open; our external consultant (who was there to deal with some of the technical glitches but also to make recommendations related to how our staff should function) was sitting with me discussing a project; my phone was ringing; I am sure I had some child-related (as in my own children) issue on my mind. A staff member came to the door, asked me something about refunds, a situation that the TPA was supposed to have handled but had not, and I don’t recall exactly what I said (I think it may have been something along the lines of “if they would just do their **?! job), but the next thing I knew I was in tears, the consultant was beating a hasty exit back to her office to give me some space, and I had reached this point:

I realized deep inside that it was never going to be enough to be passionate about the cause of the organization I work for. As much as I love management and leadership theory, there was not anything in my arsenal of knowledge and experience that could augment the passion enough to fix this set of issues. 

The tears I cried that day were a mixture of frustration, anger, sadness, grieving, resignation, and probably a few other things. As Seth Godin wrote in his post, “Organizing for Joy,” there are companies out there that “give their people the…expectation…that they will create, connect and surprise.” When an organization lowers its expectations, the “chances of amazing are really quite low.”

The day I broke was the day I knew we had given up on amazing anyone, especially ourselves.

Photo provided by Paula Kiger.

By Rhino

It’s hard to put into words what it’s like coming home. Each service member is different and each deployment is different. For me, coming home was always a disappointment. After a honeymoon period of one or two weeks, reality kicks in and you find yourself wishing you were back there. At home, I’m a nobody, either looking for work or hating the awful job I have at the time. Over there, I’m Sergeant or Sarge. I’m the guy my soldiers look up to and trust to get them home alive. My superiors know I’m the guy they won’t have to worry about, that I’ll get it done and make smart decisions when they need to get made.

When people come up to me and say, “Thank you for your service,” I never know how to react. If I think they are genuine, I will say something like, “It’s an honor” or “It’s a privilege to do so.” Sometimes though, I can tell that people are against what we’re doing over there and I really want to say, “Do you have any idea what service is?” Or “Do you know what I just gave up for you?” Just because I defend your right to free speech, doesn’t mean I’m interested in what you windbags have to say. Politics aside, no service member wants to hear “you shouldn’t have had to go” or “we shouldn’t even be there.” We, huh? What unit were you in? Were you that fellow in my truck blasting at bad guys from the gun ring? Or maybe it was you who gave me the briefing on the latest intelligence updates. We?

Forget the actual details of what a service member goes through, each story is as unique as a thumbprint. Just try to imagine falling asleep and waking up again a year later. That’s what coming home is like. You’re a year older. Things you left unfinished are still unfinished. Your car is a wreck because no one took care of it. Your clothes, music, and pop-culture references are all left over from last year. Everyone has adapted to life without you, and all that getting together and partying you and your buddies talked about never really takes place.

So now you’re home, looking for work, and a mechanic for your car. You’re trying to find a place of your own, but nothing is within your means. The job you had when you left disappeared because the company folded, so now you try to get a new job, but a resume of “I shoot people in the face, and break stuff” isn’t getting you any call backs. You hear that some of your comrades have landed on their feet, and you’re happy for them.  But, at the same time, you’re also pretty upset because you did the same job as them, or maybe even more, but you just simply had bad luck.

The only people who can relate to what you’re going through are the guys you just spent a year with. You call and occasionally meet up, but for the most part everyone has scattered to the four winds. The only person in town who seems to be able to help is the local VA rep, but even he isn’t superman. He sends you to see the people that are supposed to get you started on a career path, but all of them are state-employed slackers that are simply there to punch in and punch out.

At least the VA rep was there before, so you believe him when he tells you that it takes time. Eventually, you won’t feel the need to carry your pistol everywhere you go. He lets you know that the guard rails won’t have an IED attached to the other side. And when you hear that jet throttle-down overhead, it’s not a mortar coming down to blow you up. That stranded motorist really is having a car problem…it’s not a car bomb rigged with a cell phone detonator.

So now it’s been a few months and things are getting a little better. You have a job now, not a career, but a job at least, which is good because you felt pathetic having to collect unemployment checks since your leave time ran out. You’re hopelessly addicted to smokeless tobacco because that’s about all you were allowed to do over there. You spent a year without booze or sex, so now you’re almost a full-fledged alcoholic and porn addict, because those two items were outlawed under General Order Number One. God forbid we offend the guys trying to kill us by having booze and naked pictures in our possession! The daily questions of “what was it like?” or “did you kill anyone?” have started to taper off, but you’re still angry because this is not the vision you had in mind when you went “wheels up” for the flight home. Plus, people are beginning to notice that you’re a little on edge and angrier than usual and they seem to have the need to let you know, just in case you missed it.

The best times for you are when you run into old friends, who were also over there and begin to swap war stories. Finally, someone who gets it, who has been there too. Now, you do your part for them. You let them know what it’s going to be like for the next few months. You do for them what that VA rep did for you. You tell them that eventually it gets better. The nightmares never go away, but you have less and less as time goes on. You tell them that there are actually people out there to help you and that you will be one of them. You run into them out and about and ask the important questions: “Has it gotten better or worse? What are your plans for now and down the road? Dude, you got the G.I. Bill, might as well use it. Yeah, let’s grab a beer and watch the game. Hey, did you hear that ‘boom’ down the road? Yeah, flashback for me too. You good? Okay, talk to you later, bro.”

Phone call: “Hello?” “Tim’s gone.” “No, I just talked to him less than a week ago.” “I know, he’s gone. I’m sorry.”

Photo credit: U.S. Army Archives

By Menekse Gencer

How many times have we heard, “Do what you love and the money will come”?  I never believed it. I am a first-generation American and the child of an engineer and accountant.  Pragmatism always trumped passion. I did all the right things: graduated first in my high school class, went to Harvard, then got a Wharton MBA. Yet, I was a corporate nomad, picking up premium employer brands like I picked up academic ones. The problem was, I felt like each of my jobs was an experience similar to taking medicine. It tasted bad, but I knew it would be good for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard and learned a lot along the way, but I was unhappy. I felt like a hamster on a treadmill. I ran hard on that treadmill, but I never knew why I was doing it. During the dot com boom and bust, I was on the end of the proverbial whip. Years of amazing opportunities gave way to layoff fears prompted by investment freezes, takeovers, and turnarounds. Along the way, I learned that I could survive. And I also learned that when one gets a kick in the butt, one should be thankful. It’s that momentum that helps you move forward. And forward I went.

In 2004, I took a year sabbatical following yet another takeover, this time of Gateway by eMachines. I travelled abroad for nearly a year—soul-searching to find what would make me happy, what would be meaningful. Although I had great travel adventures, I never found my answer. Instead, I ran out of money, so I returned to San Francisco and took a consulting position with Wells Fargo to make ends meet. During this time, by chance one of my projects lead me to stumble onto a new industry, now called mobile money. Oddly, it was a convergence industry that brought together my rather eclectic background in the mobile, high tech, and now financial services sectors. After I was done with that mobile money project, I found myself researching what was happening in that industry. I would make time to read up on the industry and to talk to others about it. It became a hobby of sorts. I realized that if I enjoyed the topic so much, it might make sense to take a job doing it. And so I joined PayPal on January 2, 2007 to head up their North American mobile payments business development efforts. What started out as tremendous passion and optimism for where PayPal could ultimately take the business, two years later became frustration around internal politics. That frustration ate away at me, so I took a much needed vacation to Africa. While I was on safari, I visited a Maasai tribe. In this tribe, they had no running water and no electricity, but they did have mobile phones. After the tour, they showed me their arts and crafts in an effort to make a sale—a sale that I knew that was rare since so few people visited them.

When I returned, I was part of a week-long off-site leadership training class. As if by fate, the trainer called on me one morning to give an impromptu speech about what inspired me about my work. Without skipping a beat, I got up and began to tell the story of the Maasai. And during that story, I told my colleagues that I was inspired by the impact I could someday have on that Maasai tribe by helping them be part of the global economy by selling their wares on an online marketplace using mobile money. It was a metaphor, really, to figure out how I could use my experience to make a real difference. I didn’t know it at the time, but that moment was the turning point for me. I now look back and realize that was the moment when it became clear to me that what I had learned at PayPal, and every other position before then, was a stepping stone for something bigger and more meaningful to me.

I left PayPal soon thereafter and started up my own consulting practice, mPay Connect to help clients launch mobile money services. Along the way, I have worked with U.S. companies and international organizations. I’ve helped non-profits, banks, telecom operators, and high tech companies. I’ve learned about emerging technology and the role mobile money can play in positively impacting the poor. The passion and inspiration I feel working in this industry is the most important marketing tool for my business. It’s this passion that has given me rare opportunities that have led to consulting assignments on amazing projects in Bangladesh, Jamaica, Africa and India. The opportunities are more than I could have imagined, from being invited to participate in the World Economic Forum, to advising the U.S. administration, foreign governments, and Central Banks. Just this month, I’m especially honored to have been invited by The State Department to be one of 38 ‘TechWomen’ to mentor high-potential Middle Eastern business leaders in an effort to create closer collaboration between the U.S. and the Middle East following Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009.

When I look at how far I’ve come, I feel proud that I have been able to develop and grow my own business and earn a better living than I did in my corporate jobs, but more importantly, I am proud that I am inspired by what I do and am a happier person because of it. It’s true that when you love what you do, you don’t make the distinction anymore between your job and your personal life. It just becomes “life.”

Two years after I left PayPal, I received an email from a Kenyan who reached out to me. I had never met him before and certainly had never shared my story with him.  Here’s what he said:

“Happy new year to you. How’s winter treating you? I’m currently in Kenya for winter break working on a venture that aims to create an online market place for the small scale ethnic manufacturers that sell beads and curios at the masai market… For anyone interested in mobile payments this project is interesting as it represents a shift to using MPESA and similar services as a bridge to opening up developing world economies to the possibilities of Ecommerce… Given your vast experience in this area do you know of anyone trying out a similar project anywhere in the world that I should talk to? And If I’m not mistaken this is something you were interested in, any advice you can give is welcome.”

When you speak from the heart, the universe will speak back.

Photo provided by Menekse Gencer.

By Jeff Wenker

As a devout believer in doubt, I question everything, myself most. I’ve started this essay fourteen different times. I thought I could scribble a quick pithy bit about being a stay-at-home dad. Instead, existential angst hovers overhead, like a chopper in Abbottabad, except, you know, different.

I’m a bad stay-at-home dad. My five-year-old is upstairs taking a bath, screaming for help shampooing as I type. They say Osama bin Laden had been holed up with his kids in that moldy mansion for years. Worst Stay-at-Home Dad Ever. I’m off the hook. Perhaps. Who knows, he may have taken breaks from plotting terror to properly bathe his children. Bake cookies.

I’m an odd guy to write about work—I haven’t had a job in almost three years. They say every story has an arc like every life has a path. Except we never know when we’ve entered Act II or if we’re lost, stumbling along the wrong fucking path. Maybe we’re in sitcoms doomed to be canceled after a bad pilot, or worse picked up and put in syndication. Maybe we’re in never-ending soap operas, one drama after another with no resolution. They cancelled One Life to Live. All My Children, too.

I have two boys. And a wife. She works from home. So, technically, I’m not a true stay-at-home dad. I got backup. Traditional spheres of influence have gone out the window. The US has military bases in former Soviet Republics and dads do laundry. In our house we use the new spheres. They look more like a Venn diagram. Or an eclipse.

I used to be kind of important. I failed my way to the middle, had a million dollar budget, a team, traveled the world on someone else’s dime. Now I’m a beached white whale trying to teach two little mammals to swim on their own one day. I tell myself this is enough. Some days I’m more persuasive than others.

I don’t know how I ever assumed a role of corporate responsibility in the first place. It seemed someone made a mistake, like the producers hired an amateurish understudy based on one good audition and when the star skedaddled to Hollywood they couldn’t be fussed with hiring a professional to fill the role, figuring the play was doomed to failure anyway.

I specialize in short runs.

I can’t stop myself from saying shit like this even though it might keep me from getting such a sweet gig again. No matter. I never wanted to be doing what I had been doing in the first place. No one grows up wanting to be a PR flak. I grew up wanting to be a writer. I was a dreamer, but a problem arose. I became addicted to passive voice. And simple sentences. Fragments.

I wrote a novel and gave it to a real writer, an author, with an agent and book deals and everything. He said it had good parts. I told him, upon reflection, after I’d distanced myself from the work, that I didn’t think it was very good. He told me never to tell anyone that. He has confidence. I envy him.

Envy’s a sin. A deadly one, they say. Bertrand Russell said envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness. They say happiness is a sure cure to envy. I know this because I googled “venial sins” and stole that line from some religious website.

It’s hard to be happy when you’re paralyzed by self-doubt. And you’re lazy. Being happy seems like an awful lot of work.

I went to a tradeshow once and a guest speaker (hired, apparently, as a reprieve from the relentless tedium of technology talk) spoke about training your mind to be a positive force in improving your life. Train your mind with what, I thought. Your mind? What if your mind wasn’t the kind of mind that could train itself to be positive? Could you train your mind to be the kind of mind that could train your mind to be positive?

I didn’t mind the speaker. It was, after all, intended to be a break. I spent the time writing a poem. It wasn’t a very good poem, but I’m a better bad poet than lackluster corporate shill. Again, it does me no good to say so. It’s not like I’m suddenly going to strike it rich on the bad poetry circuit so I’ll never have to beg to do unfulfilling, albeit paying, work for the rest of my life.

My son just got himself out of the bath, clothed himself and came downstairs. I’m so proud. My neglect has made him self-sufficient. He interrupted me with his reading of a Magic Treehouse book, you know, the Jack and Annie ones, the ones for third and fourth graders. Did I mention he’s five. Either he’s really frickin’ smart or I’m a great frickin’ parent. Better than Osama bin Laden, at least.

I got fired from my first PR job on a Monday. A Monday! Would it have killed them to can me on Friday so I could have enjoyed the weekend? The boss called me into his office once and said, “This sentence has five verbs in it.” Like that was a bad thing. A co-worker there claimed our job was not PR (even though PR was in the agency’s name). He said it was a “writer’s shop.” We wrote case studies for Apple and Sun. (The companies). He went on to become a real writer, working at a tech trade magazine. I sent him emails, pitches, but he never replied.

After the second PR job I got fired from, I got fired from a third. I got hired for a fourth because this was the dotcom boom and any flak with a pulse could get a job. I quit that one and joined a startup that busted in the bust six months later. Around this time I was having dinner with one of my sisters and she told me, “You have no right to be miserable.” I scrawled the words on a slip of paper, folded it, and put it in my wallet. I take it out sometimes and sometimes I smile. This is the same sister for whom I cut up some junk mail from a credit card company and made her an “Anti-Depress” card. She gave it back to me and now it’s in a box in my basement. One of these days I’m going to clean out my basement.

Sometimes I stop and wonder what the heck I’m doing here. You know, here here. There. Examples: drunk in a roomful of marketing folk wearing a nametag that read My Name Is Fred (networking inebriated is best done under an alias); or on my back under a house pulling fiberglass insulation, face to face with a dead rat; or in a boardroom on the eve of a multi-billion dollar merger correcting the press release grammar of executives and attorneys; or wandering the floor of an air conditioning factory in Tyler, Texas; or coordinating interviews during a press junket at a resort in Indonesia; or wiping someone else’s ass.

It’s all happened for a reason. Perhaps. I envy people of faith, their ability to believe with absolute certainty in something unprovable, the strength it gives them. Me, I’m agnostic. I think.

Not having a job for three years can bum a guy out. I get lugubrious. Then I say lugubrious. Lugubrious. Loo-goo-bree-uhss. It’s hard to be lugubrious when you’re saying lugubrious. Try it, I’ll wait.

See.

So, we muddle on. Dreaming we still believe in our dreams, wondering what act this is. Maybe my generation won’t get air time, like all the TV shows that were never made because there were only three networks. I relate best with people who recognize lines from The Brady Bunch.

Pork chops and apple sauce.

We’re in the middle, between the Greatest Generation and something else, between the Baby Boomers and something else, between Generation X and something else. All this generation crap is a bunch of malarkey. Maybe it’s just me. It’s always just me. Well, you. Us. You know what I mean.

Sometimes I feel like somewhere in the last decade or so the world broke. 9/11. Iraq. The Great Recession. In the midst of it all, I blinked and went from under-qualified to over-qualified, my profession changed and no one needed me anymore. Except my son. Who needs a ride to school. This is what I do, this is my life, doing my best to raise two good boys while questioning if that’s enough.

Lugubrious.

Photo provided by Jeff Wenker.

By Lindsay Moran

Since I resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and wrote Blowing My Cover, a memoir about my experience in the CIA’s clandestine service, I frequently field the same question from interviewers, friends and other curious parties: Do you ever regret leaving?

I have always answered truthfully, “No.” I left the CIA for reasons both personal and ideological. Personally, I didn’t want to continue leading a double life—lying to my family and friends, and becoming further isolated from them, and to a certain extent, reality. Ideologically, I had become disillusioned with the organization that I’d once revered, but which from the inside looking out had proved alarmingly dysfunctional.

I was working overseas as a CIA operative on September 11th, 2001. The events of that day, devastating for all Americans, seemed even more so for my colleagues and our Agency, which was precisely the entity charged with protecting the country from such a horrific attack. No matter how it was spun over the ensuing months and years, 9-11 was undeniably a colossal intelligence failure. And it was our failure. Somehow each and every one of us at the CIA, and particularly those within the clandestine service, the intelligence-gathering arm of the Agency, bore a deep and personal responsibility for the deaths of countless Americans.

Our shared sense of guilt was not debilitating however; September 11^th merely strengthened our resolve. Mine too. I had already been considering leaving the Agency at that time. 9-11 convinced me that I should stay. An overriding mission seemed to have been mandated from above. This mission—get Osama bin Laden!—so pure in purpose that surely the petty politics, futile turf wars, and soul-killing bureaucracy that seemed to beset and beleaguer the CIA would not get in the way.

At the CIA, we knew at once that Al-Qaeda was responsible for the multi-pronged attacks of that horrible Tuesday. Long before Osama bin Laden was public enemy number one, we’d been tracking him at the Agency. I entered on duty at the CIA the same month that bin Laden and his hate-filled followers orchestrated attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths.

The following summer when my fellow Clandestine Service Trainees and I went through paramilitary training at the CIA’s spy school known as The Farm, our targets during weapons training were photocopied images of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.

When my mother reached me overseas on September 12th, 2001 and said, “They’re saying it’s some guy named…” and produced a garbled version of Osama bin Laden’s name, I had to remind myself that the American public previously had not been aware of what a grave threat this man represented, or even of his existence.

And still, after September 11th, the days turned to months and then years, and the CIA seemed no closer to getting Osama bin Laden. A grim joke among my colleagues was that bin Laden could be seated at the CIA’s popular cafeteria Starbucks, sipping a latte, and we’d be none the wiser.

Certainly after 9-11, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, previously thought to be a dumping ground for ineffectual operatives who were unwanted by the various geographical divisions, did start to attract energetic and motivated young officers. But their efforts were quickly derailed.

I was shocked when rumors started to circulate the Agency that many of us would be “surged” to support a war effort in Iraq. Iraq?! What?! We were going after the wrong country, and the wrong guy. True, Saddam Hussein was an admitted enemy of the United States, but he didn’t represent even a fraction of the threat that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda did. Yet at the CIA, we were expected to go along with the wholly erroneous notion that Operation Iraqi Freedom represented some kind of retribution for September 11th. The American public was buying it, and so should we sell it.

That’s when I lost all faith in the Agency. Indeed, I was pulled out of language training in order to devote my efforts—along with countless other officers—toward the war in Iraq.

Would we ever get Osama bin Laden? Were we even going to try? It didn’t seem so.

My resolve eroded. Whatever sense I’d maintained that I worked for an organization that served our country in some important way, and that that fact alone made all the discouraging and difficult aspects of the job worth it, evaporated. And so I quit.

Luckily for all of us, there are people at the CIA with more resolve than I. People who sallied forth in the long, arduous, anonymous, and mostly thankless pursuit of this evil man. People who didn’t let the petty politics and the fruitless turf wars and the soul-killing bureaucracy get in their way. Those people—my former colleagues—are now enjoying the sweetness of success, a hard-earned reward for their efforts. Most of them will never be known to those of us, including myself, on the outside looking in.

For me, a bit of the mystique of the CIA—its omnipotence, its overriding competence, its willingness to take risks, its spirit of can-do—has been restored. So yesterday for the first time, I might have answered that question, “Do you ever regret leaving?” differently. I might have said, Yes. If only to be there today to congratulate the men and women at the CIA, and simply to say Thanks.

Photo provided by Lindsay Moran.

By Jen Boyer

I’d barely turned 12 when the seed was planted that would determine the course of my life. Up to that point, and for years beyond it, my mother told me I would be a marine biologist, based on my love of seals, sea lions, and walruses. She wanted me to go to college, have a respectable job. Flying a helicopter didn’t qualify in her book.

Mom wasn’t home that January night in 1984 as a babysitter let us watch our one hour of prime time television before bed. Introduced to the single most gorgeous helicopter I’d ever seen, my eyes widened, my heart quickened, and my mind raced; I imagined the thrill of being at the controls flying through rust red monoliths in the Utah desert. It was that night that the aviation bug took its first bite.

Although I only saw the first half of that two-hour pilot episode of Airwolf, the damage was done. I started calling around and discovered the cheapest way to learn to fly is through the military. It fact, it was free. Unfortunately, I’d been born with hip dysplasia and this birth defect made my enlistment into any branch impossible. I couldn’t run very fast or very far. I tucked my flying dreams away.

I did attempt to pursue that marine biology career path, for exactly one year of college at the University of Oregon. It quickly became apparent that math and science weren’t my strong points. Yet, working at Oregon’s Sea Lion Caves the summer after my freshman year, talking to people about the Steller sea lion, the geology of the caves, and the local history, I realized that while I might not be any good with calculations or chemical compounds, it came without much effort to share my enthusiasm and understanding of the whole picture. I quickly changed my degree to journalism and spent the summer prepping for acceptance to the UO journalism school.

Throughout the remaining three years of school, I focused on writing and the aviation bug remained dormant. However, shortly after graduation I took a work abroad opportunity in Scotland for six months. While there I began to have dreams of helicopters—not pie-in-the-sky dreams of flying one day. Actual nighttime dreams that were so vivid I even looked into working at the Glasgow heliport, but they weren’t hiring at the time.

When I returned to the U.S. the summer of 1993, I accepted a reporting position with a weekly newspaper in downtown Seattle. I wrote about everything from racial issues to local events, and I lived in a condo with two roommates on Queen Anne Hill. From my living room I could see two of the city’s three news station heliports, and I came running whenever the news helicopters that used them flew by.

Then, almost 10 years to the day I first saw Airwolf, I had a powerful dream that reignited my drive. In it I found myself standing at the edge of a field, a place I’d dreamt of multiple times before. Yet this time I recognized the place as an airport not a field. There was a windsock in the distance, swaying lightly in the soft breeze on a warm, cloudless day. I became aware of someone standing next to me. When I turned I realized the man was Jan-Michael Vincent, the actor who portrayed Stringfellow Hawke, the hero in Airwolf. He was young, like he was during the show. He turned to me and simply said, “It’s time.”

I woke up with a start and an unquenchable desire to fly. For months I called flight schools, borrowed books about flying, and began hanging out at the airport. I eventually met the director of operations for a local flight school. He suggested I might be able to help the school build their business in exchange for flight time. I worked tirelessly and was rewarded with my first two hours in a helicopter.

I was also rewarded with my first taste of the helicopter industry. I will never forget the sensation that crystal clear February evening when the helicopter lifted off the tarmac and flew toward downtown Seattle. The director took me on that flight. He flew me past the Seattle skyline, pink in the evening light, and landed on a dock once used as a heliport in front of one of the city’s fancy waterfront restaurants. A part of me was thrilled to have taken my first helicopter ride. The little girl in me could taste her dreams coming true.

The other part of me was on high alert. This was supposed to be a demo flight, not a romantic dinner. I asked why we were landing and he claimed he was hungry. He sat across the table at the restaurant leering at me, telling me he’s no boy scout. I was a starry-eyed 22-year-old who’d shown she’d work hard to get helicopter time. I nervously spent the dinner reviewing the marketing plan and reiterating the steps we could take to build the company’s business. What were we doing at this restaurant? I wanted to fly.

Within a week the director called to tell me that his wife, who didn’t work there, had learned about me and the deal was off. I couldn’t work for the company in exchange for flight time anymore. It was too dangerous for him. I’d done nothing more than the professional work he’d requested. What was there to “learn about” and what danger did I present?

Absolutely livid, I approached the company’s owner with my side of the story. It turned out she knew nothing of the arrangement (which infuriated me further as I slowly came to understand the director’s plans). She welcomed me to pay for my flight time like everyone else and I was sent on my way. She did honor the work I performed and I received the flight time I was owed, about 90 minutes, but she held a grudge for that. I would never work for that company again, even as a pilot, and I was branded a trouble-maker.

As a journalist living off $25,000 a year, there was no way I could afford my training. A helicopter with an instructor was $135 an hour at the time. But I wasn’t about to give up. As a part of the work I’d been doing, I’d begun to put together the beginnings of a local helicopter association to push for more helicopter landing areas in the Seattle area. Local pilots, operators and helicopter manufacturers agreed to pay for membership and I was hired as the executive director. I used the $500 a month paycheck to slowly begin my training.

Through that association, I networked my tail off. I managed to garner the attention of an international helicopter magazine that began giving me regular assignments around the U.S. I began to travel, meeting helicopter people and writing about helicopter issues. It was the perfect marriage of my two favorite things, and the writing helped pay for the flying.

In the early spring of 1998, I finally had enough flight time and passed my private pilot checkride–three years after my first flight.

Not long after that, a flight school in Northern California offered me a marketing manager position. I would make much more than I’d been making as a weekly newspaper reporter and I’d have access to reduced-cost helicopter time. A little more than a year later, I’d received my commercial, instrument, flight instructor and instrument instructor helicopter ratings, and I landed my first flying job.

I became a transient helicopter pilot, working as a flight instructor, tour pilot and photo flight pilot in Sacramento then San Diego, followed by Las Vegas, slowly building 1,200 hours of flight time. After two years of that lifestyle, I’d finally logged enough hours to move into a turbine helicopter and out of flight instruction. I was 29 and recently divorced. My heart wanted something more than living with roommates at the end of a road where helicopters were needed (the next step in a pilot career for someone with my hours).

In 2000, I began to heavily lobby Frank Robinson for a job. Frank was the owner of Robinson Helicopter Company and the manufacturer of the R22 helicopter I had learned to fly and still flew on a full-time basis. He finally relented in November of that year and I became Robinson’s heliport coordinator. My job was to first save the LAX heliport from the airport’s plans to close it. Should I be successful, he’d allow me to stay on permanently to help develop and build small heliports designed for Robinson helicopters.

I put my mad networking skills to work and, in close partnership with the Professional Helicopter Pilots’ Association in Southern California, I managed to dissuade Los Angeles World Airports, the operator of LAX, from closing the heliport. I then worked with a Robinson engineer and my heliport design mentor to develop and install several small, lightweight heliports around the country. During that time I also lobbied for a heliport law change in California, which eventually passed. It was a productive four years, but my flying, done on a freelance basis at a little flight school in Long Beach, was limited.

By 2004, I’d built a good resume and a strong reputation in the helicopter industry. The desire to fly wasn’t so powerful and another instinct began to demand my attention. I was 32 and divorced with no desire to remain in Los Angeles. It was time to go home to Seattle and have a family.

As luck would have it, my helicopter experience and my work at Robinson, which included a fair amount of public relations, marketing and graphic layout work, landed me a media relations position at an airline in Seattle that year. I moved home, bought a house, and a few months later met my husband.

As it turns out, my mom was right about that college education. My journalism degree and the skills I learned in school opened doors that a simple helicopter license wouldn’t have. My writing paid for my flight school, and it continues to keep me in the black today.

Now, in 2011, 27 years after Airwolf first flew across my television screen, I am still very active in the industry. I am a contributing editor for Vertical and Vertical 911—the helicopter industry’s leading publications. I am the executive director of a tour helicopter operator safety organization. I volunteer every summer to put together the American Heroes Air Show in Seattle at the Museum of Flight. I started my own PR company, Flying Penguin PR to provide brand building, reputation management and crisis communications support to multiple companies, several in the helicopter industry.  And I’m a mentor to many aspiring pilots through the Whirly-Girls, the female helicopter pilots’ association.

I had a dream, and despite a physical disability that limits how far I can walk or run, and left me with a limp, I achieved that dream. It took me places, and still provides adventures, I never imagined. I’ve flown over glaciers in Alaska, skimmed between the rocks in the Valley of Fire, chased illegal aliens east of El Paso, witnessed a patient intubation mid-flight in San Diego, landed on oilrigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and hovered over marijuana hidden in the sugar cane in Hawaii. I’ve flown a Bell 222­—the same model as Airwolf—and I’ve even met Airwolf’s real pilot.

I have also achieved my other dream, to have a family. I’m a wife and mom of two. I’ve had my daughter’s name picked out since I was 12—she’s named after a gorgeous and determined female helicopter pilot in none other than Airwolf.

Photo provided by Jen Boyer.

By Suzanne Farrow

It’s been over 15 years since I wrote my business school application essays professing to know what I would be doing with my MBA. I realized at the time the futility of making such declarations, but it’s simply a rite of passage. Upon finishing business school two years later, the big decision of where to go next had been made and I re-entered the work world firmly in control of my future, or so it seemed.

Needless to say, when your big decision is to take a job at Enron, your career has the potential to immediately veer off course. I was about to give birth to our first child when the company filed for bankruptcy and I was tired of watching the mind-numbing news coverage of my friends, boxes in hand, filing out of the building. So, I was ignoring the conversation as my medical resident husband chatted with the other resident in the delivery room, until the resident turned to me and asked, “Are you a doctor, too?”  “No, I have an MBA.”  “Oh.  You weren’t one of those Enron MBAs, were you?”  “Actually, yes I was.”  (Cue the uncomfortable silence, a quick apology, and a rapid exit.)

And that’s where the “fun” started. I was determined to ignore my business school essay career plans and look at any potential position that seemed interesting and challenging. Months of job searching in a Houston economy glutted with people just like me resulted in some comical interviews:

“So, I see you were laid off from your last job. Did that bother you?”

“Well, no, the whole company filed for bankruptcy. Our entire department was laid off.”

“So, then you didn’t take it personally?”

“Did I take it personally that the company filed for bankruptcy? No. I don’t think they did it to upset me. Did I take it personally that they laid me off? Well, since I was one of THOUSANDS being laid off, no, I don’t think I could take that personally.”

I’m a practical girl, so eventually I did the responsible thing for my family and accepted a similar role to the one I had at Enron. I quickly realized that all those big things I thought I wanted—a challenging career with a rapid ascent up the corporate ladder, a comfortable salary, recognition by my colleagues for my skills and contributions—I just didn’t want anymore. But how do you walk away from a job and a career path you worked so hard to get?

And then God had a way of intervening to shake things up…a lot. Our second child needed open heart surgery when she was born in order to survive, and then was on a feeding tube for a year. It’s hard to be a type-A control freak and realize you have absolutely no control over the things that matter to you the most. I knew I couldn’t go back to work after maternity leave, so I took the leap and quit. A husband still in residency, a toddler at home, a newborn needing occupational and physical therapy, and no income, and yet, it gave me peace to walk away.

They tell you “not to sweat the small stuff” and yet the small stuff is sometimes what really matters, especially in the midst of all the big stuff. And I don’t mean that staying at home versus working outside the home is the right way to go, or that some jobs are more important than others. What I mean is that every day, there are small things, small decisions, small interactions that can make a huge impact. Over the last year, I’ve had the honor of getting to know two “ordinary” people whose extraordinary stories have driven this home for me.

Kristin Elliott is a Baylor University student who was diagnosed with an incurable and terminal cancer several years ago. Her doctors contacted the Make-a-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes to critically ill young people. Make-A-Wish asked Kristin what they could do for her. Personally, I would have gone with something off my bucket list (which, by the way, I don’t yet have despite my 9 year-old son’s admonition that I need to “get on that” since I’m turning 40 this year). Kristin asked for help funding housing for AIDS orphans in Zambia. Make-A-Wish wasn’t sure what to make of a request like that, but they gave her a small amount of money, the same amount they give for a typical shopping spree. Once her story reached the Houston Chronicle, her money started to grow. Then the story hit ABC’s World News, where she was named a Person of the Week and eventually one of their Persons of the Year, and her fundraising exploded as money poured in from all over the country. Kristin has since built an orphanage, partly funded a clinic for AIDS patients, and has been able to visit Zambia to see the children she is helping—a remarkable and unexpected outcome that started very small.

Kris Hogan is the Athletic Director and Head Football Coach at Faith Christian School in Grapevine, Texas where in 2008, his varsity football team was scheduled to play Gainesville State School. Gainesville State School is anything but your typical high school opponent. Gainesville is a maximum-security youth correctional facility where all the players earn the right to play football with good grades and good behavior. Because the players are incarcerated, they cannot have family or friends at the games, so they usually have very few people present to cheer for them. Kris emailed the parents at Faith Christian and asked that half of them sit on the Gainesville side of the field. On the day of the game, Faith Christian made a spirit line that stretched over half the length of the field, cheerleaders made signs, and the stands on both sides were filled. The Gainesville players assumed that their opponents just had lots of fans and that they had put the overflow crowd on Gainesville’s side of the field. As they started to walk around the spirit line, their coach told them, “It’s for you.  RUN.” The Faith Christian parents cheered for the Gainesville players by name. Many of the players said this was the first time they had ever had anyone cheer for them, for anything. When asked, Kris and his wife Amy said they couldn’t understand at the time why it was such a big deal. But Kris’ decision to have his school’s parents cheer for the other team has had a long-lasting impact. As with the adult prison population, the recidivism rate for kids coming out of youth correctional facilities is very high, but for the boys who played that night and for those who have played in the now annual game since, the recidivism rate has been zero. That one simple decision to cheer for the other team has led to the creation of a non-profit, One Heart Project, targeting at-risk and previously incarcerated youth to help them prepare for jobs, education, and life outside prison. One simple decision that seemed so easy is now exploding into something that is positively impacting so many.

So, some small stuff is just small stuff—annoyances as we go about our daily lives. However, some small stuff can turn out to be a catalyst for things that have long-lasting and far-reaching results. Thousands of small things along the way have helped my daughter grow into the healthy and happy kindergartener she is today, and hundreds of small decisions have led me, in my work with non-profits, to cross paths with people like Kristin and Kris. These days, I’m far more inspired by their philosophy of doing what they can where they can than I am by the master plans I once wrote for myself in those long-ago admissions essays. I now make a point of sweating the small stuff knowing that, if I do, the big picture will most likely take care of itself.

Photo provided by Suzanne Farrow.

By Mary-Katherine Brooks Fleming

“Mary-Katherine Brooks from Carthage, Tennessee, what are your thoughts on this company’s use of accounts receivable?”

I rose, sweating in the relentless DC summer heat. I hated this professor and his poor imitation of my thick Southern accent. For the third day in a row I would attempt to explain why I believed this company was using its accounts receivables and deferred tax credits as part of a broader effort to conceal a massive ponzi scheme, and for the third day in a row the professor would berate my ignorance of corporate accounting methods and, to the amusement of my classmates, label my observations as ‘crazy.’

“Ms. Brooks, did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, this is a good company and you simply aren’t able to understand basic accounting principles?”

Beyond the humiliation I resented his power over me: it was 1997, the end of my freshman year, and I needed a passing grade in this Accounting class in order to switch majors from Math to Finance. I understood the accounting principles in question—that wasn’t the problem. My professor and I had philosophical differences on interpreting this particular company’s treatment of its inventory.

“Professor, did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, the only reason Enron isn’t in bankruptcy right now is because shareholders and analysts are willing to ignore corporate fraud as long as the share price is rising?”

I often wonder how many of my classmates went on to become research analysts at investment banks, and how many of them spotted Enron’s accounting tricks but kept quiet. You’d have to be pretty sure of yourself, or completely crazy, to call out one of the largest blue-chip companies in the world for corporate fraud (this likely explains why no one called Enron out until 2001). You may be crazy, but you might also be right.

This story illustrates a defining aspect of my personality: I have always been, and will likely always be, that crazy person.

When I graduated from high school, I already knew that I was crazy because everyone told me so. I had high hopes for college, but my dream of fitting in was shattered pretty much as soon as I unpacked. The guidance counselor at my rural high school in Tennessee had existed to manage teenage pregnancies, abused children, and troubled lives—not to help anyone prepare for, much less navigate, life at an Ivy League university. I was woefully ill-prepared, and I tried to mask my fear behind a boisterous personality and amusing accent.

I decided I was going to major in two subjects I knew little about but liked a lot: Math and Russian. Russian I could start from scratch, but it soon became clear that my high school math courses were deficient beyond belief. My calculus professor was outraged that Georgetown’s admissions office had accepted someone who had never taken pre-calculus, and thought I was crazy for deciding to major in my weakest subject. I decided to take his advice and become a Finance major, so I could “make up numbers with all the other kids who can’t do math.”

After graduating in 2000, most of my fellow Finance majors went straight to banking jobs on Wall Street, or moved to New York to find their fortunes in some other way. I did not have a job, and didn’t know anyone in New York, so I took stock of the world around me: Russia was experiencing its second banking crisis in two years, and my expat friends in Moscow were returning home. In the U.S., the internet bubble was bursting and classmates just two years ahead of me were being laid off en masse, so I saw no reason to follow my unemployed classmates to New York. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I came up with the crazy idea of moving to Asia, which had recovered from the infamous 1998 flu.

By this point, I had long since given up on trying to fit in and was learning to use my uniqueness to my advantage. When I showed up in Hong Kong’s Exchange Square, handing out copies of my resume and buying drinks for anyone who looked like a banker, I had no competition and interviewed with every investment bank and brokerage firm on the island. When I accepted a job with a brokerage firm three months later and moved to Tokyo, I was the only finance expat in Roppongi who was female, 21, and spoke with a heavy Southern accent. When I moved back to Hong Kong four years later, I didn’t fit in much better but had matured enough to enjoy it. I took pleasure in the small things, like the shock on the face of this site’s editor when she heard me order a drink in my favorite vodka bar. “You speak RUSSIAN?  No offense, but I barely understand your English. Seriously, where are you from? And how did you get HERE?”  These questions never offended me—I loved telling the story of how I arrived then thrived in Asia. It underscored my tenacity, my determination, my fearlessness, my innate ability to promote the hell out of myself, and most importantly my willingness to take calculated risks. I was confident. Proud. Seven years into my career, I had molded my weirdness into uniqueness and made it work for me. I wasn’t crazy anymore, I was awesome.

In early 2007, my father became a candidate for a heart transplant, and I started looking for jobs closer to home that weren’t bound by rigid market hours. I thought my early success in Asia would provide limitless options, but I was shocked to realize how narrow my choices had become. I’d gone to a great school and had done really well for myself, but my experience was confined to a very niche area of finance, with a brokerage firm instead of a full-service investment bank and in Asia instead of the U.S. According to headhunters and hiring managers, I was ill-suited for any position other than the one I had, even though I possessed and was able to demonstrate all of the skills necessary to succeed in new industries that sounded interesting to me. The story of how I ended up trading stocks in Asia wasn’t cute anymore, much less appealing to potential employers—I was told that I sounded ‘flaky’ and ‘directionless.’ After all, I had majored in Russian then moved to Hong Kong, and now I wanted to leave Asia and Finance too? The decisions I made were logical—shouldn’t I get credit for finding my way from dot-com bust to opportunity? For being flexible and achieving even though the world had shifted in a way that no one had foreseen? For staying with the same firm for seven years and building a successful business? I worked HARD. I was GOOD. Unfortunately, I was also STUCK.

Thoroughly shaken, I decided the wisest next move would be grad school and paid a consultant $2,500 to rewrite the story of a flaky, crazy Southerner into that of a confident, unique business leader. It worked.

The irony of my time at Wharton was that I went there to create options for myself. But the major recruiters at business schools are big corporations, consulting firms, and investment banks. And they hate risk. They avoid it like the plague. To succeed, you had better fit the mold. When 2008 unleashed a series of events that would make ‘risk-averse’ a positive attribute, I realized I’d better squeeze myself into that mold if I wanted a job. As a result, I practiced explaining my career trajectory as a series of non-risky, thoroughly correlated events that were part of a master plan, and talked my way into a job that I hated and paid way less than the one I had before business school. That, by far, was the craziest thing I’ve ever done. Adding insult to injury, the job I took was in a highly specialized niche of the financial landscape (reinsurance) and served to limit my job prospects even further.

So, I came up with a crazy plan to finally start thinking about what I enjoy doing, what I’m good at doing, and how to get a paycheck for doing it. I also finally started being honest with myself about the sort of person I am and the type of life I want to live.  Two years and 200 dates later, this led to reconnecting with a grad school classmate I had never thought of as ‘husband material,’ and eight months later I married the man of my dreams. Two years and 200 interviews later, I finally started being honest with myself about the type of career I need to pursue, and now I’m running my own IT consulting firm for non-profits by day and devoting my time to managing marketing and business development opportunities for a fashion start-up by night. If you look at my resume, you won’t see anything that points to IT specialist much less fashion designer, so this career change might seem to be the craziest of all. But maybe that’s what makes it right.

Photo provided by Mary-Katherine Brooks Fleming.

By Laurance Price

These days I spend a lot of time facing a computer screen, reacting to emails, checking my very risky investments, and setting up an online study program. In my monthly dark moon phase, I would say these are all time drains requiring no special skills and adding no particular value to my life or anyone else’s.

In my fuller moon days, I get excited about new ways of making a living with passions of my youth leading the way: a mushroom farm on a substrate of coffee grounds; a marijuana and mixed herb greenhouse ready to launch when the legislation finally breaks through; a tahina and hummus kitchen; an adventure guide for fathers and sons; a doorstep milk and bagel delivery business; videos capturing family histories. The list gets longer every day. And although they don’t all connect with my teenage desire to be a game ranger, they skirt around the same sort of lifestyle.

There are days when I explore great plans that pay no rent at all. Setting up a local time bank, a hub for service exchanges and community building. Not the kind of community I am currently entrenched with, all of us connecting through our electronic portals, but more of the community I really need: sitting by my side over coffee, drumming together, sharing parenting skills, holding the ladder while I get the cat down.

There is some irony in that community calling I feel today. During my teens I felt like an alien and believed the job of wildlife guardian in a remote reserve would shelter me from those overbearing peer pressures and connect me to a greater reality. But those were also the last years of apartheid and the South African army was waiting for me if I ever broke free of my schooling. So I left the country of my birth and only returned 25 years later. My professional path had taken many interesting back roads by then but none of them remotely close to becoming a game warden.

The closest I ever got to taking care of wild places was when I settled in Tanzania. One of the first jobs I talked my way into was filming gorillas in the Virunga Hills in Uganda. As with almost all my film jobs of the past two decades, I harbored a lingering anxiety that I would be found out. I was pushing my way through thick nettles in the lush undergrowth, grappling with a heavy camera in search of a newborn gorilla, the hero of our show. But she was being protected by the troop and when I finally got a glimpse of her, the angle was wrong, the camera was shaking from my exhaustion, and there was no doubt once again that I was merely posturing as a filmmaker.

When my friend from the Dar es Salaam Yacht Club asked if I knew anyone who could do commercials for the new mobile operator he was managing, I nevertheless nominated myself, and I suddenly became a commercials director. This was in the early days of TV in East Africa and anything vaguely shiny with a good beat would impress. And so my career moved rapidly, from one purported success to another. Another friend introduced me to a gold miner who decided that an AIDS awareness project would butter over his industry’s exploitative image. I started climbing Kilimanjaro with camera in hand to tell a heroic story. I had never climbed before nor did I know whose story to tell and to whom, but the result was a high-end home movie for the climbers and they commissioned me for the same job every year until I got bored and handed it over to a friend.

I then met this guy working with the World Wildlife Foundation who was as sick of his office job as I was of the editing room. He decided to check out the suitability of the habitat for black rhinos in the Selous Game Reserve. Of course this required a three-week expedition with 20 porters carrying our gear from one side of the Selous to the other. Great hiking and survival fun. A few interesting hippo charges. But very little wildlife footage as we were a noisy bunch, and animals are not stupid. But the film documented, with the help of some really great stand-ups, what was important research. I think 12 people have ever seen it.

The biggest scoop in my career as a dubious professional was the result of a chance meeting after playing touch rugby with the husband of a very powerful woman in an international development organisation. She liked movies and thought I probably did too.  And this led to her commissioning a wonderful, six-year series of films on the impact of international aid and development strategies on remote villages in Tanzania. After she signed the contract with me, she left to work for the World Bank, leaving me to get on with it for the next five years, as best I could. It was a dream job in some respects, combining my interests in anthropology, rural poverty, travel, and even a smattering of wildlife (especially when visiting one of the communities where hunting and gathering is a way of life). And it paid the bills for almost a decade. In fact, as I sit here figuring out my next move, I am still drawing on her generosity.

The thing is: I have made a fine living out of making films no one wants to see. I might not care if these were silly social marketing clips or nonsense instructional films, but the Village Voices series chronicled groundbreaking longitudinal studies of rural Africans and the poverty trap from which they cannot break free. The stories they tell should be informing progressive poverty alleviation policies today. Yet I would estimate that about 300 people have ever seen this series that cost almost a million dollars.

This is due in large part to the political climate in East Africa; in a fine example of how the fear of being politically incorrect secures the status quo, the politicians there have essentially shelved the poverty series. The good news, I suppose, is that I am free to take these stories from the poverty experts themselves (the rural poor) and bring them to a wider audience. That’s the online study program—for students of global issues and international development—that more or less anchors me amid stray thoughts of mushroom farms and hummus kitchens.

Photo provided by Laurance Price.

By Malvolio

One day in June, I exited Harvard with all my worldly belongings, a laser-like determination to succeed, and an unshakeable certainty that I was certain to. With this seemingly clear vision of my golden future, I never stopped to ask myself a number of key questions, including: succeed at what? And how? Even more importantly: why was the idea of success so important to me in the first place?

So without a second thought (or even a first one), I sprinted out of the gate, complete with friendliness, two credit cards, and a work ethic that had gotten me through what were considered to be the best schools in America.

I felt particularly proud of my work ethic. In fact, I had spent most of my life developing it: through hours of studying, reading, writing, arithmetic, all the while taking my SSATs, SATs, and LSATs without complaint. I had worked during summer vacations, first (in my own personal version of an Edith Wharton novel) at the ’21’ Club escorting customers who were downstairs to the maitre d’ upstairs. Then, the following summer (as Wharton gave way to McInerney), I waited tables at an Uptown restaurant called ALEX GOES TO CAMP, a venue so cool—at least at the time—that goldfish in fantastically shaped fishbowls adorned each table in the center of every cloth. Only some of the customers complained. Not about the fish, but rather about me, and my poor skills as a waiter. But then again, I could always wiggle out of it with smile, and the coy admission that I wasn’t really a waiter, but a Harvard student, putting myself to use during my summer vacation. Working.

I worked my way from the ground up in Hollywood, arriving three days after graduation, answering an ad in Daily Variety, and interviewing as a receptionist. I got the job. I was thrilled: I had achieved my first goal! Success!!!

The good and bad news about Hollywood is that it is totally unstable. Everything changes all the time. No job lasts forever. And everybody gets fired. So, somewhere after getting fired from that receptionist job, I clawed my way into a job reading scripts at a fairly important company. I got promoted, and, after my boss got fired, I ran the company’s movie division. Around that time, I had the good fortune to date a terrific girl whose boss happened to be running a Studio. Before she got fired, she had the good sense to dump me, but when her boss the Chairman got fired from his job shortly thereafter, he was hired by his former bosses at a different Studio where he had gotten fired previously. As I was getting fired, he hired me. Shortly thereafter, he fired me. Then he got fired. Then his bosses got fired, too.

Somewhere in all this activity, I became dreadfully dissatisfied. And awfully sad. In that order.

Maybe it was seeing many worthwhile scripts I had worked on morph into movies that sucked. (Luckily, by the time most of those movies came out, practically everybody, myself included, had been fired years before, so no one was deemed responsible for them except the people who weren’t responsible for them at all.) Maybe I realized after savoring at least some success that savoring that success wasn’t all that savory. Or that failure and the disappointment that followed felt just as transient, too.

Where would I find satisfaction? And how and why, despite my work ethic, determination, and decidedly glamorous degrees that were so fun to delay revealing to others, could I have been so utterly…dumb?

I decided to reflect. And start again. From scratch.

For the first time, I gave some thought to the question of what work I might love to do. This happened because I had been eavesdropping. Someone (who happened to be my boss at the time) once said that if you love what you do, work doesn’t feel like work at all. It wasn’t said to me, but I was luckily standing nearby to the person to whom it was said, so I overheard the advice. I fought against my urge to smack the person who had said it and luckily I won, because that would have resulted in my being fired yet again. As I preened a bit over my restraint, it dawned on me with great horror that I was envious, terribly envious in fact, that not only had this person discovered something that I did not know, something that was simple and clear, but that he really, truly, genuinely had something I wanted—not a job, but a purpose. That is: he had found what he loved to do, and he was in the midst of doing it. I was not.

I was subsequently fired from this job later on, but that’s a story for another day.

And then I read somewhere that what you do is as important as how you do it, which is just as important as why you chose to do it in the first place. No one had explained that to me as I was zipping through Emerson and Thoreau my sophomore year. I felt a certain amount of rage about that.

But after reflecting some more, I realized that goals, and achieving them, and success, or the lack of it, and setbacks, and their inevitability, were all incidental.

Loving what I do, and doing the best I can, and knowing why doing the work I am doing is meaningful to me, actually counted much more. And understanding why something worked or didn’t, and assessing how I might have done better or worse at it, with the greatest intelligence I could muster, was, in fact, downright…fun. Surprise!

And then I realized that perhaps I had been zipping though Emerson and Thoreau my sophomore year a bit too quickly. Maybe all that was in there. My rage diminished a little.

I started my own businesses. Every day, I break down my time into tasks: sending an email, reading a script. Every day, one simple step. Or five. After a certain number of these of these kinds of days pass, it’s easy to look back and realize that quite a few things have happened.

The good news is I don’t plan on firing myself anytime soon.

In the meantime, I’ve got credit card bills to pay and a mortgage payment to tackle every month. I also need to make my daughter lunch. And dinner. And breakfast.

So I keep at it. But with a more satisfied and much more sensible step.