A friend of mine here in the blogosphere, Randy Maness , wrote about how he felt his life was going nowhere. He’s a young guy and is at a crossroad that many of us face in our lives. It stirred up a lot of memories and I have the answer to his dilemma. I have to tell you a little about myself so you all will get my point.

I have a great mom who taught me how to read before I started kindergarten. The first book I read was The Swiss Family Robinson and I was so proud I read aloud to all who would listen. It’s amazing how a good parent can make reading fun at that age, so I am fortunate.

I started college as a food science major, became bored and switched to a music major. I am a lifelong guitarist who can read music and improvise; I practiced sometimes ten hours a day every day and never became the least bit uninterested. As a music major in school I made good grades, but it sucked the inspiration out of me. You can’t teach art or music to anyone. You can show them the mechanics and theories but they must teach themselves in the end. You can only teach them how to teach themselves!

I switched my major to biochemistry and to this day I’ll never know why. I have but 17 credit hours remaining to earn my degree, but I had grown to hate how it was taught. Most graduates will have a job which will be factory-like work. You do step by step what you are instructed and you’ll retire doing the same thing. The lucky students or natural geniuses get all the jobs inventing and discovering. That is the education systems fault. They expect you to be mediocre and the few star students will shine. An example is students are taught formulas in math so they can solve problems. Just plug in the numbers and boom, there’s your answer. That’s the problem right there. They should be taught how to understand the theory and derive their own formulas. They won’t need to remember which formula to use and they actually understand how it works! However, when the system expects mediocrity they teach mediocrity.

I quit college my last semester and moved to Phoenix Arizona to study Luthiery. No, it’s not a religion; it is the art of building guitars by hand. I loved it and to this day have handmade over 250 guitars. Upon graduation I was amazingly hired as a guitar design engineer for Peavey Electronics Corporation in Meridian Mississippi. This was a great job and the company wanted to change their reputation for making the industries worst instruments. It was a dream come true.

Then came the political nightmare I sensed even before I started. There is a showcase of every music instrument manufacturer on earth every year in Anaheim California called the NAMM show. It was just after Christmas and we faced the impossible task of handbuilding 75 or so custom shop level guitars. Each must be perfect as most were signature models for famous rock stars. The big star at the time was Eddie Van Halen from the band Van Halen. I worked for one-hundred and twenty-seven hours without sleep only stopping to use the bathroom and eat. Thats 127 hours of misery I’ll never forget. My feet and calves turned black from all the weird crouching that happens doing this type of work. My hands were shaking and I was in a stupor of exhaustion. They told me to go home, shower and come right back to fly to Anaheim for the five day show! I was told I’d be fired if I didn’t go.

The owner of the company, Hartley Peavey, staged photographs of how he and Eddie Van Halen built the guitars and gave a speech at the show before thousands to display the pictures on a big screen. Now tell me that wouldn’t make you want to throw his body in a lake somewhere. Soon after, I quit the job I had dreamed of all my life.

I have dozens of other certifications in so many types of jobs, I couldn’t begin to list them all without some research. I have finally come to the answer I wish I had known 15 years ago. I want to work for myself. I am working on several things now that make me happy. I’m writing two books and learning the skills needed for success on the web. I love it and have found my calling! Do what makes you happy. Like my friend at that point in his life trying to decide, I stressed loving the job should be the criteria for choosing one. Remember, even if you love your job it may turn out to be a nasty divorce. I wish the real world weren’t full of these situations, but it is – and loving a job was never meant to be that hard.

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