Only recently I realised that no matter how ancient we grow, the one thing that can stop us from growing old is the desire to learn new things all the time. (Not that am an old goat, actually I am at the beginning of the adventure really!)
Freshly out of college, I really didn't really think anybody would want to hire me for any purpose at all, perhaps I would actually have to pay them to give me work. However fortunately some old friend remembered how I had this crazy way of coming up with perfectly useless ideas, (he actually thought it was creative of me) that he convinced his boss to meet me. The bloke worked in a print media design firm, and having no experience whatsoever, I decided this was a great opportunity to find out what exactly it takes to land some paying job.... Well the long and the short of it was that the boss found my perfectly naive notions about business, ambitions and achievements worth investing in....suddenly I was an employed person, and I plunged into my work..learning the basics, asking all the various questions I thought were relevant....and generally making quite an ass of myself sometimes. The work was fun, I really enjoyed haggling with the vendor to lower the per unit price of printing, meeting a hight profile director of a corporate bank {Corp affairs, rather interesting job profile methinks} and exploring my writing skills with corny one liners and 'copywriting'. Well the other people thought I was good at it any way...
Now not drifting any more from my opening sentence{which I had begun to forget by now}, I continued to learn, grow and all that jazz.
But you know, I think somewhere down the line I got tired of conning myself. Eleven months down the line and I wasn't sure I was learning anything new at all.....redundancy, in any form gets to me....and here I was, doing the same stuff day after day....feeling like this empty space within me was just growing....I began to suffer from what I'd term as "creative exhaustion"...really starved for any bright ideas, no scintillating copy flowing out of me...nothing to drive me to work everyday...
By then not only was I feeling my work wasn't up to the mark, but also totally cut off from the world, getting to a point where I didn't care anymore.
Finally I decided to quit my job, look for something else....I now work someplace else, doing something totally different and in the three weeks I have been there, I have learnt a lot....the feeling is intoxicating...picking up new skills always is...it will be a while before I can really precisely describe what I do at work, until then I am happy to just amble along and learn things at a leisurely pace...
Only one thought though gnaws at my heart, how long until I get fed up again? And is it a disease or is it okay to wander along?
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