The Hero’s Journey (or: I quit my job and I don’t want a new one)
“You’re quitting.”
My boss is a good guy. I’ve observed to him that he is one of the most peculiar fellows I’ve ever met. Though this seems to wound him, he takes it in good cheer. While I find him utterly indecipherable, that sense of opacity doesn’t go both ways. He reads minds, when he remembers to venture outside of his own.
“…How did you know?”
I decided one afternoon in January that I would quit my job. In the midst of terrifying economic headlines, soaring unemployment and an uncertain future, I chose to separate myself from an organization that loved me, paid me well and showed me endless respect and appreciation.
“It’s nothing about working for me, or anything, is it? Because if there’s something else you’d rather be doing, we can find you a different spot, working on something else.”
Full Sail University is a private school on the northern end of Orlando. Trying to describe Full Sail takes the better part of our 200 page catalog, and even that barely scratches the surface. Let’s just say it’s one of the most incredible places anyone could ever work. I got my Bachelor’s at Full Sail and I’ve worked there six years: first as an intern, next as its first search engine marketing manager, then as a project manager for our COO.
“You’ve been a great boss. I’m not leaving because of you. And I still believe in the incredible work we do. I’m leaving because if I stay here, I’ll have a solid future with a lot of growth and responsibility. And that will be great. But I’ll never do the thing that I’m supposed to do. The thing I was made to do.”
I never planned a six year stint at a private college in Florida, of all places. But I was lucky: Full Sail took me seriously and invested heavily in my growth. I was spoiled rotten and so I stayed. Despite this prolonged comfort, somehow I felt no fear as I told my boss I’d be leaving no later than July 1st. The sense of command, clarity and confidence it gave to my future was a powerful horse that I rode into the decision.
“Early on, I had this same conversation with my boss. I was convinced I had to leave to do what I had to do. Are you sure leaving is the only way you can do this?”
Since that day, I half-heartedly worked at finding my next job. The realization came slowly, over three months. The truth is that I don’t want another job. I don’t want another boss. I am the best-qualified person to analyze and direct my energies. I am happiest when I have the freedom to split up my day into two or three chunks. I’m happiest when I can work all morning and take the afternoon off, then come back to my project at midnight and work until sunrise. I am positively blissful when making my own decisions and executing them without need for approval, delegation or committee discussion. As of today, my job search is over. I’m my next job.
“I love everyone here. It’s not that I want to get away from here. It’s that I need to make things. I need to take a space that has nothing and fill it with a something. Something that works well. Something that makes people happy. That makes their lives better. I need to go in search of how to dedicate 100% of my energies to that task.”
So on July 1st, I’ll say goodbye to my job. I’ll say goodbye to Florida on my longest roadtrip ever and make a new home somewhere around Seattle — Bellevue is looking great. I will cultivate my lifelong obsession with the creation of things that make people happy. Somehow, I will keep myself clothed, fed and out of the rain. It’s going to be hard. I’m confident that if I keep at it, continue working at it every single day until it drives me mad, then keep going anyway, I’ll be okay. The details are, as they say, just details.
Most importantly, though, I will be living for my own purposes as my own keeper.
I’m sure there will be a paycheck or two still to be collected in my future: maybe something part-time at Whole Foods to make ends meet or, heck, even some short-term officey stuff if it’s for a group who can teach me about how to better be a maker of things. The focus, though, is now all about personally setting the course for my everyday life.
I can’t wait for July.
How to Get Started as an iPhone Developer
See the 2010 updated edition of this post.
Reader Benjamin wrote to me tonight and asked:
I have researched some into iPhone programming as I am obsessed with every application that is available for my own iPhone. The problem is that the amount of books and articles out there about programming for an iPhone is enormous. Do you have any recommendations for a few killer books to read in order to learn the process/language?
What a great question. It’s one I’ve been getting a lot from people I know since my apps went on sale.
Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone and the lure of the App Store’s profit potential, there’s plenty of crap floating around promising to teach you how to program for this new platform. Much of it sucks. Thankfully, there’s some gold to be found for iPhone SDK autodidacts. Let’s check it out. More…
Duh: Apple’s Out of the Woods
Last week I got to meet an Apple VP.
Meeting any sort of dignitary from Apple would make my day worth remembering, but this guy was the real deal. He was Apple’s VP of Education, John Couch. John goes far enough back at Apple to have been recruited by a 20-year-old Steve Jobs. This guy worked on the Lisa.
Like I said: the real deal.
Apple was at Full Sail to participate in the announcement of Project Launchbox, a program where students from nearly all our disciplines get MacBook Pro laptops and pro-level software like Logic and Final Cut Studio at very deep discounts. The announcement took place as over one hundred new students — the first of over 4,000 students in the next 12 months — unpacked their new Macs. The students were salivating as they waited to plunge their power buttons for the first time.
Why does our hip but small private college warrant this attention from Apple? It probably helps that Full Sail is the first college to try this on such a massive scale. But it goes deeper than that.
One of the most resonant things John Couch told the assembled mass of students and faculty during the announcement was that education was in Apple’s DNA. And this is absolutely true: so many of today’s most passionate Mac users have memories of the platform — and Apple’s attendant philosophy of user empowerment — that span the decades back toward their childhoods. My own elementary school was loaded to the gills with Apple IIs and eventually with LC 500s. These, plus the help of an SE at home, were the devices that taught me how to be creative.
Stuff I Like: 2007 Nissan Sentra 2.0S
I have distinct memories of my first car, a 1986 Chrysler LeBaron. Purchased with the help of my folks in November of 2001, she was forest green in color – the deep, glittering sort of green you might hope to see in the eyes of a woman who’s eager to spend some time with you. 
Sadly, LeBaron DAR-000, which in an act of criminal negligence I left unchristened, had troubles from the outset. Her primary logic board failed within my first week of ownership. Her engine shuddered for unfathomable reasons. One of her taillights wasn’t quite as bright as the other.
But at 16 years old, none of these things mattered to me. I loved LeBaron with the sort of passion that only the young are able to muster. For the first time, I felt myself the master of my own destiny. In the saddle of this fine steed, the world was a buffet of experience just waiting for me to grab a plate. With the help of my more automotively-gifted friends, I got her running on all cylinders and enjoyed a genuinely speedy little ride.
But like so many of the gifts of youth, LeBaron was to be a transient presence in my life. More…
The “Accept or Decline” Game: Everyday Decision Trees
Every man who has ever been in public while in the company of other trusted men has played some variant of the “Accept or Decline” game. This goes for women, too. The game is dead-simple. The first man points out a woman across the room and then asks the second man, “Accept or Decline?”