How Your Job Can Feed Your Vocation, Passion or Art - Introduction

Once you've taken the step of either making peace with your job or finding a different one, you can begin to explore how you might use your job to feed your dream. Briefly, here are some areas to look at. I'll go into each of them in more detail later:

• The skills you use OTJ.
• The people you meet and work with - your connections.
• Your schedule.
• The location of your workplace.
• Things you can buy at discount, or other material resources.
• Your commute.
• Opportunities you encounter.
• And whatever else you can find.

Most jobs won't have ideal or even good situations in all eight categories. Your task is to figure out where the strengths of your job situation lie and how to make the most of them.

Here's one benefit of holding a day job as long as it's a reasonably good one: it gets you out in the larger world and forces you to stay sharp. I've met people who lost jobs and were able to score up to two years of unemployment benefits that paid for their needs adequately (not all benefits do) but who accomplished almost nothing in terms of building a new life or working on a long-held dream during their unemployment. My theory is that once their lives lost the daily structure a job can provide, they weren't able to work without it.

If you want to do something badly enough, you'll find ways to do it while you're still employed. Let's start by looking at how the people we've been following could make use of the obvious and not so obvious benefits from their day jobs.