Save Changes. Save your Sanity.

Save changes. Especially when you're doing boring work. There is little excuse for doing boring work once, and none for doing it twice.

Thanks to my incompetence, this is my life for the next twenty minutes:

Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste.

I owe some real posts to this blog. There's been plenty of insightful interesting activity in my career lately. Sometime after the copying and pasting.

Still Flowing

Just a little further evidence from BBC's coverage of the UK general election that people really do love flowcharts.

A Moment of Truth

Almost a year ago now I met a guy at a friend's birthday who asked me the best question I've ever been asked. I told him that I'd been feeling restless in my job and didn't know whether I needed to change my existing one, to get a new one in the same industry, or option 3; to entertain these crazy thoughts I was having about doing something completely different - something more in line with what I used to want to do before life became about being made an 'associate' (whatever that means) or otherwise climbing the corporate ladder.

He said

"If you had no financial worries, no social pressures, no doubt in your mind that you were good enough, no industry barriers to entry,.... If you really had nothing to hold you back, what would you do?"

and as he said the words, I felt each of those fears and obstacles melt away in my mind until I was left, for one brief moment, with the answer, right before they all came flooding back.

I wanted to be a writer.

That day I said those words out loud for the first time, and one of only a few times ever. The guy turned out to be an IT consultant turned film director, so we talked some more about making these changes - how scary it is, how it doesn't happen overnight, how the fears and obstacles are real and prohibitive and need to be worked around.

And of course he was right. One year later I am a Business Analyst in another bank, equally lost/confused/intimidated about what I want to do. But I do remember that conversation often, because in this frantic world I find that a moment of true clarity is something to be treasured.