Birthdays

My birthday couldn't have come at a worse time, I've been really busy all October and am now really looking forward to a day off. And by day off I don't mean one to catch up with friends, but actually to literally just do my own thing for hours on end.

But who can we kid, Birthdays are a time of reflection, my 25th year was a trying year and surprisingly a highly self indulgent one. On saturday evening I was at a friends birthday party, which followed my own fairly dismal party earlier that afternoon.

There was this guy from the Airforce there that really stuck out, classic 'Driver' personality, extremely extroverted, extremely literal-task oriented. He asked the birthday girl 'Between Oct 16th this year and October 16th last year what have you achieved?' I think he meant it as a positive question, but it was interesting to observe how it played out.

As 3/4 of the population aren't driven task-oriented people, its actually quite a depressing question. My friends repsonse was 'ummm...nothing.' Which I'm sure isn't the case, but fact is she couldn't think of anything. She put the question to me next (since she knew it was around my birthday where the Airforce dude didn't) and my response was:

1. Published my first comic book.
2. Ran a half-marathon.

Which was all that came to mind on the spot. I've actually finished two solo efforts this year, initiated a creative posse whom I'm learning from constantly and we have been able to produce three zines thus far. I folded my first business this year, ran my first strategic review session, wrote a report got quoted in the Age Business Day, restarted tutoring a refugee...

When I think about it, I've achieved a lot, its just that any visable success alludes me. Certainly financial success.

Serendipitously Harvard showed me a TED video, that concluded with the old 'formula' for happiness: 'If money weren't an issue would you still be doing the job you are doing' and the guy concluded with the observation 'you are dead for a long time', which reminds me of the year 12 valedictory breakfast keynote speaker 'Fidds' who pointed out 'life is a brief flash of light between two infinitely long stretches of darkness' and all of this, is to say easily forgotten.

Am I who I want to be? Of course not. But there is a difference, I am at least doing some of the things I need to do to be that person. In my mind, nowhere near enough, its hard to do, so tempting to just let myself decay through idleness into less than myself.

My party was themed 'loser' and I think some people (like my brother who seemed overly concerned I was having a shitty birthday) think I'm in some kind of depressed funk. So if I really reflect though, I can explain this fearful moniker 'loser' in the terms I think about it.

The first thing is that your life is organised for you, you are born, your parents raise you, send you to kinder 12-13 years later you graduate from highschool, these days the majority go on to 'Higher Education' 4-6 years later you graduate, get a job, start earning money, buy a house, no longer have the financial freedom to choose the job and that's your life until you have kids.

You don't notice the current until you swim against it. On the surface I could make the argument that I'm regressing, I had a job, earned more money than I could spend, travelled the world, didn't return to work, opened my own business, spent more money than I could earn, closed the business (fired myself) got a crappy part time job (the one I had before Honda) plan to return to Uni - and then based on history should end up back in high-school.

It's surprisingly hard to not just be idling away my years working on a career, for one, I never noticed before but one feels compelled to apologise for your own existence. You can't for example simply say 'There isn't an employer I've found yet that is suitable for what I'm good at, so I choose not to work' or 'I'm trying to create my own business so I can work under conditions I feel are ideal' or even 'I don't know what to do with my life so I'm just trying a bunch of things until I find traction somewhere' it's really hard.

My dismal business consulting career, involved going into situations that in hindsight I just couldn't win. Or absorbed far more energy for the small victories than the value I was creating. But any time I doubted myself, and listened to my peers I would remember my old job that was accompanied with genuine praise and ample funds involved 4 hours of boredom a day. As I sat in a chair gaining weight and waiting for the rare opportunity to take on something challenging and develop.

I think the way I was gong at Honda was that I had a compulsion that would inevitably end up having me take on too much and get myself fired. I don't mean working 14 hours, I mean taking on the establishement, the global standards of how Honda does Business. I would have been encouraged too because Honda has a wonderful philosophy, but I'm one of the rare people who is at their worst when they are confident, way too cocksure and my ability to empathise just dissappears.

Anyway, I've learnt these three things that I enjoy in the whole process of the last year:

1. Drawing (predominantly or creating)
2. Running
3. Arguing (predominantly, and reasoning)

They are mundane things, but it is incredible what I had to go through, physically and psychologically to find this out. That's the strength of the current right there. If in year ten I had gone to my career councellor and given him these three things, the world is such that I would have walked out thinking I wanted to be an actuary.

Where if he was doing right by me, he would have said: 'These three things combine best in being a Graffiti artist, there's no money and a very real possibility of arrest, but with your running and ability to argue, you would probably do better than a lot of guys. I suggest dropping out of school as fast as you can'.

It doesn't happen. It's incredibly hard to overcome all the grafted desires for things you never really wanted to remember you loved art. If it was hard for someone as stubborn and arrogant as me, I know there must be more people really hard done by their parents/education.

That above list is very very valuable to me. And learning how to be a loser, how to fail and not be afraid of it.

You see beyond the inherent depression of not succeeding, it's liberating. Because the fear of failure doesn't mean you are driven to succeed. In my experience it drives one to simply want to appear to be succeeding.

It wouldn't be my birthday without a basketball analogy, but the way most people live their lives is for fear of going up against Jordan and being humiliated, they instead just go play in the mundane under 12's league, becoming MVP in a competition that is no competition.

Its taken me a long time (like 3 years) to accept that I would rather be in a position to fail at something I want to do, than be comfortable in the success of something that is no achievement to me at all.

You know I am now all about 'be a loser, if thats what it takes to put yourself in the game you want to be playing' stop wasting effort trying to be a winner, because as the cliche goes 'you are dead for a long time'. Alternatively you are not occupying the space of someone who really wants that position.