You make a very good point changing my big fat cheque analogy to “a deep cushion of career satisfaction”. The money pales when you’re talking about how you feel getting up every day. I think you’re lucky to have found the satisfaction you expected, but you’ll have brought that on yourself through your hard work. Keep on doing what you’re doing, Steve, and one day you’ll unzip that cushion of career satisfaction and find it stuffed with $100 bills. I find a lot of old, crumbling foam inside mine, but I did find a 1 euro coin a couple of weeks back.

Mark

“You’ll know if you’ve jumped: you won’t be able to stop writing. It’s all you’ll want to do. It’s what you’ll think about doing when you’re doing other stuff. You’ll stay up at night writing that novel no one’s commissioned you to write. Then you’ll write a second and a third and a fourth although no one wanted the first. And you’ll complete them all and still want to write a fifth. You’ll choose writing over going to the gym, lounging on the beach, watching the tube, spending time with friends, being with your family. You’ll never give up the dream although it’s long since turned into a nightmare, because as long as you’re writing you’re still in free-fall and that’s the only way to keep that devastating head-on-concrete wake-up blow from finally happening.”

This whole post was great, but the above paragraph pretty much summed it up. We bring up the “always want to be writing” topic at my writer’s group meetings all the time.

I was in my car before, thinking about the “job” days, when I made great money for being bored, where I looked forward to Monday with great dread.

Nowadays, the money isn’t great BUT is getting better, my boss is a pretty decent guy, and I get to work on projects I like.

I jumped 16 months ago. Occasionally I want to grip a window ledge during the fall, but I’d rather keep falling into a deep cushion of career satisfaction.

Thanks, as always, for a great post!

Steve