Doing the Hard Stuff

Lately, I've been reading a lot about doing what you love and making your business reflect your true self. These are great messages, and worth paying attention to.

But sometimes we need a reality check. Doing what you love doesn't always pay the bills. Selecting only for jobs you think are an expression of your true self may leave you foundering.

Sometimes, you have to do something you don't love.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of believing that doing what feels good, having a great time every moment you are working, and enjoying every second of your job will lead to success. And, to be sure, loving your work will breed success. It's impossible to take your business to great places if you hate everything about it.

But work is work, and some days everything will suck.

Some days you'll be tired. You'll wish you were doing something else. You'll want to put down your work and do something different.

And following those desires just might cause you to fail.

Your livelihood depends on someone paying you for your goods or services. Your customers don't pay you for your happiness, and many of them probably don't care about how you feel. They want their product, and they want it when you said you'd deliver it.

Failure to deliver will drive your customers away.

And that's just what happens when you do something besides the work you thought you were going to love when you took the job.

Ideally, you would only take jobs you truly care about. But, especially if your business is new or struggling, you may find that the only way to keep yourself afloat is to take a job simply because it's available and you're qualified.

This is where I now find myself. I am trying to focus on exactly what I want to do, sure. But the market is competitive and there are more editors than there are contracts, so passing up work that doesn't perfectly suit my personality simply isn't an option.

I'm not saying you should take whatever work comes your way just because someone will pay you to do it. But consider whether you can survive on only the ideal jobs. How many of those exist, and how much can you earn by accepting nothing else?

It's vital, then, to figure out where your lines are. What are your ideal customers like? What are your acceptable customers like? What is completely unacceptable?

Oops?

When I began editing and studying online, I found I had to juggle my time in order to get everything done. Lunch breaks were an easy solution: I can accomplish two or three tasks in the same time frame (eating, classwork, and editing). It made absolute sense to do a lot of my editing work at my desk at work.

However, at work I use a Windows-based computer, which was provided by my employer in biotech. At home I use a Mac, which I own. Once I am freelancing full-time, all my work will be done on the Mac.

And this brings me to the "oops." As much as I love the Mac platform, I've gotten really comfortable working on the PC. I've set folders up on the PC to segregate in-process work from completed and published work. I have files for images, for different authors, for different projects. Everything is very organized.

I've also been working exclusively in Word for Windows when I edit documents provided to me by my authors. As I learned (to my great disappointment and frustration) during my first copyediting class, Word for Windows is not equivalent to Word for Mac.

So I've set up a situation, quite unintentionally, such that I will be totally a fish out of water when I quit the biotech job, unless I make some changes.

I don't relish the thought of lugging my MacBook back and forth to work every day, but it seems like a superior idea to striking out on my own and having to learn an entirely new software, not to mention lacking any real organization for the projects I've already completed or have in progress.

What a mundane dilemma.

Frustrations and Commitments

I've been struggling a lot lately with frustration about my current situation.

I am employed full-time at a biotech company. I've worked in biotech for more than ten years now, and it hasn't been a bad journey. But last summer I felt the need to do something different, and began to pursue a career in editing.

These jobs are very different. I currently do both, fitting editing (which is freelance) in around my biotech career (which happens during normal business hours). It hasn't always been easy, but so far I've managed okay.

My plan is to continue to work in biotech until I've made a livable wage from editing for at least six months, to ensure I won't immediately fail and have to go right back to what I've been doing. This necessitates a long timeline, since I'm only starting and have yet to reach anything like a livable wage.

However, I love editing, and lately that career is really going well. I have new clients, exciting work, excellent business relationships, and a great deal of hope regarding the future.

Biotech, meanwhile, feels old, dull, and tedious. Complex tasks that used to excite me now befuddle me, and every day feels like drudgery. Little annoyances blossom into major setbacks. My routine work has gotten sloppy. I don't feel like I belong there anymore.

But I know my plan is sound, and I need to stick with it to mitigate the risks I face. Were I to leave my current job now, I'd be unable to pay all of my bills in as little as two months without securing additional income. I'd likely end up right back at the biotech firm, with far less credibility for having left.

So I keep at the day job, as much as I may dislike it. I try not to daydream about what it will be like when I am editing full time, because I know I'm glossing over all the bad stuff. But I have to say, at this point, I welcome the challenges and anxiously await facing them.

It's All Just Too Much!

One issue I've been struggling with lately is the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Although I'm hoping to edit full time at some point, that point has not yet arrived, so I still work full time for a biotech company. In addition, I have ongoing editing projects and I'm enrolled in a four-class copyediting certification course through the University of California San Diego. This amounts to somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty hours of work per week. This is not something I'm used to.

I've been trying to remind myself that it won't always be like this, but it's tough. My business plan includes making a livable income from editing for at least six months before quitting biotech, so at the absolute best I'll still be doing this until the summer. Since I haven't yet even achieved a livable income, that's an unlikely scenario. It's exhausting thinking about spending this sort of energy indefinitely.

I've forgotten what it feels like to be bored. Every "free" moment I have is taken up by some sort of work. Even once I'm done with my 9-5, editing, classwork, blogging, and job hunting, there are still chores to be done and errands to be run. I spend lunch breaks at my desk preparing articles for magazine publication. I cram homework in between dinnertime and bedtime. Three free minutes? That's enough to send an email.

I know it will get better eventually and I try to remind myself that everyone goes through something like this when they're starting out. But every time I have to turn down an invitation to lunch or dinner, every time I realize I'm about to miss a deadline and end up rushing (and, of course, feeling I haven't done my best work), I cringe. I hope one day not to have to schedule every activity of my life to make sure it all gets done, but I don't have much hope that's going to happen anytime soon.

On Feeling Lost

This past summer, I started my journey on a new career path. I have never felt so lost in my life.

The feeling I was most struck by was the sense that I knew nothing and had no direction. I felt inadequate, unprepared, and unskilled. I knew where I wanted to end up but I had absolutely no idea what was required to get there.

I wondered, then, why I hadn't felt that way when starting my career in biotech. Surely, as a professional in my thirties, I had at least some basic grasp of language and editing? Certainly much more than I had understood, as an 18-year-old undergrad, the finer points of biochemistry and genetics. So why hadn't I felt as lost and without direction in my teens as I did this summer?

The answer, once I found it, seemed simple: when I was eighteen, I expected to be lost and unskilled. I knew that I had no idea what I was doing, but I wasn't supposed to. Who, as a college freshman, is excepted to have all the skills and knowledge of a professional with ten years' industry experience? No one, of course.

The problem, then, wasn't that I was inept or unskilled, only inexperienced. Once I realized that, my panic about having no clue what to do next subsided.

I decided to join a local writers' group and begin a copyedting certification course online. The writers' group exposed me to other industry professionals and got my feet wet actually marking real copy. The online course taught me the basics of editing and gave me confidence that I could actually succeed because I now knew what I was doing.

In a few short months my outlook changed from sheer panic over having no idea what to do next to fierce determination to make things work and a plan to make that happen.

So if you're beginning a new career after years doing something else entirely and feel like you can't surmount any obstacles because you don't even recognize yet what your obstacles are, relax. You're not alone. Take a few deep breaths and remember that everyone has to start from scratch. Your journey has already begun.

Introduction

Throughout high school and college, I knew where my career was headed. In my AP Biology class, we demonstrated genetic crossover using Pop-Beads and drew poster-sized Punnet squares. I was hooked on genetics, and I followed that interest all the way to a Bachelor of Science in Genetics from Texas A&M University.

Ten years in the biotech industry helped me grow, learn, and change. It also burned me out. The things I loved about science became hard to notice amidst the corporate drudgery I faced daily. Discovery was replaced by profit, innovation by efficiency, and creativity by mistake-proofing.

It was then that I began to consider doing something different with my life. I had always had a passion for language. I've been a long-standing member of such online communities as LiveJournal's grammar_nazis and wrongworddammit. I own a well-worn copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Lynne Truss makes me giggle, and Grammar Girl has me loudly agreeing with her blog.

I was at my job in biotech one day, cringing at a poorly-written poster advertising upcoming events in the next month, wishing I could take a red pen to it, when I realized, I could do this. It wasn't just that I was bothered by the Totally random Capitalization the poster author had used, or their repeated abuse of apostrophe's. It was that I knew it could be so much more polished and professional with a tiny bit of work.

When I considered things more deeply, I realized I had been editing for years. I had long provided feedback to my writer friends on short stories, blog entries, professional articles, and the like, pointing out issues like "your hook is strong, but you don't really support it in the body of the article" or "this description would be much more effective if it happened earlier, to give the reader a better idea about who this guy is". I had regularly been complimented on my ability to help an author tidy up or enhance their work, and often asked, "Have you considered being an editor?".

So when the time came to consider something besides what I'd always done, editing was the natural choice.

I made the decision in July to try something new. I'm still working 40+ hours a week in biotech, but I've started spending more and more time editing. I'm working to build my client base into something that can support full-time work. And someday, I'll leave the corporate environment behind and strike out on my own.