I Can See Clearly Now

Ready Fire Aim

I’ve been doing some thinking, while I search for my next job. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just write for a living about things that interest me? The challenge is that I have so many interests.

Johnny Nash, who is of course in my Spotify Top #500 songs, is probably a good reference for this. When I was studying music at Berklee, one of the first questions I was asked, was “What is your genre?” by one of the professors. He scoffed when I listed several genres, saying “Well I guess you won’t go anywhere in this career.”

He would have said the same to Johnny Nash. nash was successful in reggae, country, R&B, Soul, and pop. His lifetime earnings are not a matter of public information, but his albums sold in the millions, so his diversity didn’t impede his career.

The genre comment was valid though. When I look at the most highly successful people, they tend to have a stickability where they stay in their wheelhouse throughout their careers. My problem is that I have a fascination for so many different things.

One of my daughters has been recently diagnosed as having ADHD and tells me that my characteristics are very similar to hers. Lately, I have been thinking she might be right, but I wouldn’t change anything, well not much. if it’s true, then I have made it a strength, not an obstacle.

I have frequently been pigeonholed in my career to date, but the irony is that people who travelled on parts of my journey, know me as one thing, and other people associate me with a very different area.

I have been a telecommunications expert, a retail solutions pioneer, a location-based services evangelist, a writer, a trainer, a mobile and wireless computing advocate, a president of a youth music centre, a singer-songwriter, a manager in government, a pioneer in AR and an importer of cool products like holographic consumer toys. In most of these areas, I have been considered one of the ‘experts’. That’s because when I do something, I apply 100% to it. I push the boundaries and when someone says, ‘You can’t do that,” it motivates me to do it.

This makes me a multi-skilled generalist who has learned to apply skills across many industries, which I feel has given me a distinct advantage over many people who have been in those industries longer than I have. It has made me a great problem solver, combined with my inherent skills in seeing patterns. Maybe that’s why I like LLMs that predict what will come next.

With age against me, and employers looking for people with specific experience in their niche, I’m finding it harder to get my next job. I always thought that writing would be the enduring tool that would allow me to continue working irrespective of my age and my physical health. However, while I am very good at researching and writing about things I know little about (partly because I love learning), it is often hard to get excited about the topics, even if I am interested in the subject matter.

I can write articles that motivate people. But when I’m writing for a client, I’m not typically writing from the heart. I’m following someone else’s brief. As I wrote in one of my songs “You’ve got to pay the piper.”

For example, I did a great job (imho) writing a marketing document that an IT Manager could use to sell the concept of Microsoft Modern Computing to his board, which has no interest in IT whatsoever. But I can’t say I was passionate about doing the work. I did believe in the benefits of my client’s business, but the topic didn’t get me out of bed in the morning.

So I’ve been wondering, is it possible to write about all of the things I want to write about, within one blog, without disenfranchising my readers, and one day eke out a living doing it with paid subscribers? I used to hate the idea of having people pay for my writing, but now I’m thinking, as many writers do, this is work. It just happens to be work I enjoy doing, just like an entertainer or a sportsperson. Is it wrong that Taylor Swift or Rafa Nadal get paid for doing what they enjoy? I think it might be a legacy from my late father, (that I disagreed with) who was an excellent artist, but undersold himself because he wanted everyone to be able to afford his work. As a consequence of his philosophy, we had very little of anything growing up, while his peers’ work sold for six figures.

As I’m thinking about this, I note that I do not get a lot of organic subscribers through Substack. The search engines don’t seem to look at it much and 25% of my readers are fellow Substack writers. Several have left recently for other platforms, like Ghost, which made me wonder if perhaps I am on the wrong platform.

I am going to experiment a little and start adding pages to this blog. There will always be a musical element to it because to me music is like breathing. It’s pervasive. Music is The Rhythm of Life.

I hope this will work. If you only want to read my biography, you can ignore the other parts. I’m not going to charge as yet, I think I should try to create what I want first, and I will always offer my work for free. Perhaps I can produce extra value that people feel is worthy of a modest paid subscription. That will certainly allow me to commit more time to it.