You Want To Be A Rockstar
Early vs. later-life aspirations, and a little announcement!
The Teardown
Monday :: June 17th, 2024 :: Approx. 5 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we evolve in concert with the technology that enables our day-to-day lives. If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox every week, hit the subscribe button at end of the post.
Early Life Pursuits
Life often presents you with a vexing question: what do you want to be when you grow up?
If you asked me when I was younger - roughly between the ages of ten and twenty-two - I would have answered with:
Architect
Rockstar
Of course, there are rockstar architects. But I meant actual rockstar. And to be more precise and less glamorous, professional drummer. Drumming was a logical path. I was one of most talented drummers in my high school, and interned at a music booking agency during college. Other pursuits had me writing code for a something akin to a local music event aggregator website, and sketching the high-level details of music artist promotion business.
At age twenty-two, I woke up in a defined benefits contract job at Fidelity Investments. I wasn’t rockstar in flesh and certainly not a high-performing member of the team.
What happened?
Your Career Course Is Dynamic
Life has meticulous plans and spontaneous events.
My dad attended night-school for an MBA, and did his school-related work at home. I was the spontaneous benefactor of that work. Our house quickly housed mysterious textbooks with near-random three and four-letter acronyms instructing readers in the ways of a particular computer language or computer topic.
One day, I began reading one of them. It was a book about a technology known as Visual Basic for Applications - VBA for short. The book centered on using VBA to build business applications around the Microsoft Access product and underlying database model.
During roughly the same period of years, I also learned to build websites.
My everlasting desire to do things fast soon took over, and I researched how to automate website creation. I didn’t need to write nuisance HTML blocks for each small website update.
Instead, I developed my own content-management system (“CMS”) that opened my eyes to something known as the Structured Query Language (“SQL”), a language and interface from a database of information to a consumer of information. Think a website with thousands of comments, all stored in some database.
I learned enough SQL to work with a database without significant hand-holding. And, at twenty-three, I landed in a job that required frequent SQL work.
The job was in insurance, an industry few young people dream about during the day or at night, or well, really ever. But I worked with interesting people. I spent my day with a technology product that helped insurance companies develop (more) accurate replacement cost estimations for homes they insured.
Was an architect? No. Was I rockstar? Absolutely not. Throngs of groupies weren’t waiting for me to throw my post-concert underwear at them. Sorry for that image, by the way.
Insurance did and still does catch my attention and spark my imagination
Is it something I wanted to do when I was contemplating my future at age ten?
A New(er) Vexing Thought Train
I’m contemplating a tangent of the question after my recent lay-off, split into two parts:
If you could do anything, what would it be?
What’s your dream role?
I articulated two parts because a role implies you’re doing one job, oversimplifying the reality that a typical corporate role may cover many responsibilities.
Doing anything, by contrast, leads to an opaque but interesting thought experiment: would you do multiple things that catch and hold your attention?
Another way to ask the question: why aren’t you doing multiple things that catch and hold your attention?
Let’s assume, for the sake of this topic, that making and balancing time isn’t a problem.
One answer I recently quipped to my wife: a writer. I laughed when I said it.
Writing doesn’t have the typical compensation profile of the profession most associated with the bulk of my career: an actuary.
But, I’ve always been writing. I wrote poems in high school, hiding these written bits from my parents in every way possible. A close friend introduced me to LiveJournal in college, catalyzing a blogging and self-expression habit that lasted through all of college, and has a soul in this publication.
And, during a spontaneous conversation with one of my subscribers at a local kids climbing gym, I was encouraged to keep writing The Teardown, and turn it into a paying and multi-million dollar juggernaut while I debate other professional pursuits. Why not?
“I’d pay!”
This post is really about doing one of those many things. I’ve long debated turning on the ability for you, trusted subscriber, to pay me if I’m writing something that you like reading and prioritize among many of life’s important nags, joys, and other moments.
So, I’m going to turn on subscriptions. Not yet, but soon.
The email inbox is a sacred space. It’s where you spend lots of time sorting through life.
And, it’s a place that can - to some extent - make or break a business. I want to make sure you aren’t paying for something that wastes your time and mine.
I’m planning to flip the switch on paid subscriptions around the beginning of July. And, at that time, I’ll explain what I’m planning in more detail.
Maybe, just maybe, I’ll add something like professional writer to my resume.