What are your short-term and long-term goals in your career? How do they align with your values?
How very timely.
My short-term goal is survival by whatever means I have available to me. I am working online jobs as I can, and I also have my disability pittance. This is not really enough, but I am hatching a plan.
My long-term career is to get an online business off the ground so that I can support myself and my family from anywhere I can find wifi. I am currently thinking about what I can do, trying to nail down a few things I can try to see what works out. I don’t want to spread myself too thin or dilute my efforts, but I don’t think putting all my eggs in one basket is the way to go either, since being self-employed can be a little more unpredictable than a regular jobby job. Nonetheless, starting my own business is an opportunity to build something that aligns with, and potentially amplifies, my values.
Survival and building a foundation for stability are my top motivators, but living my values comes in right after that. To refresh, when I started writing on this series of prompts, I defined my values as:
- Openness
- Creativity
- Kindness
- Knowing what I don’t know
- Action
I think I will redefine “knowing what I don’t know” in 2 ways: humility, and the pursuit of knowledge. It takes a certain amount of humility to own up to not knowing things. What you do after that makes a difference. Remaining ignorant is an option, but it certainly isn’t in line with my values or my natural predisposition.
Humility is more than that, of course. I broadly define it as not imagining that I am better than other people and being willing to serve. Humility is the root of being able to show up with love. I know there’s some tendency out there toward performative humility in the form of downplaying one’s own accomplishments or passing the credit straight onto God, but that doesn’t prove anything about your willingness to show up and serve. That’s assuming a certain definition of pride that isn’t the one I hold. Pride is the opposite of humility– feeling like you’re better than other people, being unwilling to bend to give someone else a hand, not showing up unless there’s going to be some sort of personal reward, even if it is just being praised for being “so selfless.”
I can’t judge what’s in other people’s hearts, and I don’t mean that definition as an indictment of anyone’s character. The only person I can work on is myself, after all. It only matters if I am living up to my own values.
Which brings me back to the original purpose of this blog. I have gotten a little sidetracked. The important thing was supposed to be the experiments, trying things out and working on myself, and then being honest and upfront about how the efforts are panning out. The fact that I went months and months without ever mentioning that I had applied for City Teaching Alliance and Teach for America is a clue that I haven’t been following through on that.
I hope to fold this blog into my business empire, but even if it never makes a dime, it is still worth doing because writing it is good for me, and it hits my openness and creativity values square in the face. It also takes some humility for me to put myself out there, especially when I am doing more learning than succeeding. I hope that it gives me some opportunities to extend kindness and grace to others. Those are things I want out of any work I do.
I am still nailing down the specifics of my potential business lines. Creating content is on the list. Freelance writing is on the list. Research is on the list. Arts, crafts, and consulting are on the list too. Taking action and moving forward on one or more of those is the important thing. It’s more important that endlessly making lists and charts. And taking action is one of my values too.
The Mia Experiment 