Love of my life, Marie Forleo, has a fab blog in which I await her latest postings with, you know, bated breath. I’m in her coaching program, so you’d think I’d get enough Marie. You’d be very wrong. Love letter aside, I got an update from Marie today announcing her latest post was – gasp! – by some dude called Johnny B. Truant. Well, poop. I clicked anyway because I trust Marie’s judgment and I am oh-so-glad I did.

This would be Johnny

Mr. Truant is now the second love of my life and maybe we can all get married and live in a house together whilst blogging about our passions. I was nodding my head like a crazy person at every sentence. He wrote about Marie’s concept about being a “multi-passionate entrepreneur” and how it’s okay to be yourself and not get stuck talking about your niche all the time. I’ve grown to hate that word.

What should you do… FOREVER?

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately with the theme “what should I do with my life?” and am reading a book by the same name by Po Bronson. Take that, combined with Marie’s program and my serious Quarterlife Crisis and I come to the conclusion that not only does it not matter, but you don’t have to choose just one thing. I know I’ve written about this before, but this is the first time I’ve been super-okay with that. I really enjoy what I do – helping authors connect online – but understanding that it’s not something I’ll do forever makes me love it. It makes me better.

Do I really want to give career and social media advice for the rest of my life? Not particularly. And that’s the reason I started the Pajama Job Hunt. You’d think that starting a company slash classroom would require some form of long-term commitment, but it’s the lack of commitment that solidified my decision.

I was so bogged down with the idea that I needed to find the PERFECT job, The One that combined all my passions so I wouldn’t feel bored 30 years from now. But too much of anything can make you sick. When I first decided to go to culinary school a guy I was dating told me, “Are you sure that’s something you want to do?” I thought he wasn’t being supportive but he explained, “I just don’t want you to lose that passion you have for baking by making it your job.” He is one smart cookie.

You don’t always lose your passion if it’s your job, but tying yourself down can make you multi-passionate people question that choice for years. I don’t want to be that person. At first I though about combining all my passions, maybe open a bakery to satisfy my pastry passion, write about opening the store to satisfy my writer’s passion, probably blog and Twitter about it to satisfy my social media addition, then travel and sell things I found in said store. I’d write about that too. As lovely as that sounds, I think instead of focusing on 50,000 things at once it might be more beneficial to do what feels natural RIGHT NOW.

When I quit my publicity job I enrolled in culinary school immediately, thinking I needed to “catch up”. I couldn’t find a cosigner for my loan though and was devastated. Now I think it happened for a reason, because while I’ll do the pastry thing asap, right now it feels good to blog and write and help authors. I want to move ahead into the career/social media thing and, funnily enough, the Pajama Job Hunt came about when I finally let all that other pressure go.

Just a number, baby

People are “accomplished” when in an industry for 20 years. Especially authors. “John Smith is a board certified Expert in Blahblahblah and taught Expertness at College X for 15 years and has written 50 trillion books on Expertise. He resides in Kentucky with his wife, Jane, and their dog, Expert.” You’ve seen that bio a hundred times. It’s all about how long you’ve been doing something, how many times you’ve been acknowledged for doing it and how public you’ve been in the process. I bet John is sick to death of Expertise, don’t you think? Plus, how much of an expert can he still be? Industries change.

You are made up of many passions

I’m going to leave you with this little nugget of awesome: Truant wrote, “Carving out one aspect of yourself and saying ‘This is who I am’ is dumb.”

Love that man.

Tagged as: blogging, Career, Culinary, johnny b truant, marie forleo, Social Media, what the hell is my life about