It’s been a busy business week. Let me give you a bit of background to me and biz.
I decided two and a half years ago, when I left the bank I worked in at the time (as the department I was a union representative for was finally, sadly, closed down – with, it has to be admitted even so, the agreement of most concerned), that I would set up as self-employed, one way or another. But the objective was not to repeat the story of unhappy work-life balance I’d lived under for just about seven years.
Rather, I looked to do something else: earn fairly enough to enjoy my life, whilst I helped sustain the economic needs of my family.
Up until this month, a big part of this involved writing my political, technological and philosophical blog. It didn’t report too many earnings (August’s accumulated payout was just over $27), but I always felt I was on the edge of breaking through.
Until this month.
Until my yearning for creative activity was slowly but surely displaced by other outlets of endeavour. First and foremost, my English classes. I’d taught the language to the Spanish for many years, even dabbled in multimedia learning, but I’d never had the broadband connection I knew I needed to properly fulfil my ambitions.
November 2012 was the date when all that changed. It took me perhaps four or five months of trials to acquire a sensible understanding of what worked online and through video-conferencing systems. And as befits the profession of trainer, I’m still – of course – in the continual process of learning. But that was the date when an ambition I had had since around the year 2000 became reality. Sometimes persistence of vision is rewarded. For me, in this at least, it is beginning to be.
It’s creative creating new ways of learning; responding to individual learning needs; reacting in a focussed way to personal requirements; being that path a student really wants. Sometimes, even, being that process a student might not actually want but does need anyway.
And so I come back to what I wanted of business, when I left the bank I’d kind of laboured heavily for and then looked to start out a new life. And I remembered – I remember – what I really didn’t want: being happy as teacher and trainer, being personally fulfilled as a learning guide, I most certainly wasn’t looking to develop an empire of enterprise. Instead, I was looking to surround myself with the cocoon of work-life balance – earn enough to keep my family, even as I was able to keep a level head.
To reach my ultimate level of incompetence was definitely not my goal.
But it’s funny how experience changes one. Don’t get me wrong. I love what I’m doing right now: love the editing; love the training; love the feeling I’m being useful (when I was writing my political blog, I felt anything but if truth be told …) – in fact, I love almost everything I find myself doing as my work continues to be validated by returning customers and their unbidden referrals.
Whilst money can be such a beastly thing, it’s also nice when people without too much to hand care to choose to lay it at your door, month after month.
You feel valued.
Even as you know money isn’t half the value of this curious world.
So whilst my urge to create through my writing is being inhibited, instead I find myself both joyously teaching and selflessly working with others’ words.
The thing is to be creative, above all else. To be creative, whatever you do. To do stuff which is new, which doesn’t remove from what is old. Which adds to the world, rather than replaces that which we once loved.
But sometimes experience makes you want more, doesn’t it? Not that you get greedy. Just a sort of little kind of buzz that captures your attention and, perhaps, disconcerts you too.
This week for me, then, has been a busy biz buzz when I suddenly have realised why all these business people like their business-type stuff. Not that I want to become like them – I don’t want to lose sight of my love for people, for one thing – but, at least, I now understand them better; I understand why they sometimes act as they do.
Sometimes money can turn heads so easily, can’t it? Sometimes money also does its stuff.
And sometimes that stuff ain’t all that disagreeable.
