From the Editor’s Desk: Just One Piece of the Success Puzzle (Premium)

We’ve all heard some version of the advice “do what you love” or “follow your passion” from some well-meaning family member, friend, or outsider. Compared to the equally schlocky “everything happens for a reason,” which is just a call for the passive acceptance of those things you cannot change, it is at least an action item, a to-do.

The problem, of course, is that it can be bad advice. And I bet it’s given, most often, by those who are even not doing what they love themselves, because that’s how advice usually works. It’s sort of a to-don’t, when you think about it. But most work requires some set of skills, and those skills don’t always align with one’s passion. Perhaps it’s better to focus on what you’re good at, with an emphasis on those areas in which you can make a difference.

Granted, none of this even applies to me, as I’m in the very lucky position of doing something that I love that I’m good at, and, in its own small way, can make a difference. And because this thing, writing, can just as luckily be done anywhere at any time, I’m also in the very lucky position of being able to indulge some of my other passions, like travel, without them getting in the way.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Coming out of high school, I was never going to do anything other than “be an artist,” whatever that meant, or slightly less vaguely, “do something with this skill” that I had. But it didn’t take me very long into my first semester in art school that fall to realize that I was on a fast track to never making any money at all. My response was to give up because it just felt so futile. I dropped out after one year, and about four months after I had quietly given up internally.

I didn’t see it this way at the time, but this, too, was lucky. As it turns out, I was interested in other things too, and it was clear that one of them, my love of what I’ll now call personal technology, could lead to a lucrative career. And so my post-art school years involved part-time and then full-time study with the aim of becoming a computer programmer. And then life took me in another direction, albeit a related one, and here we are. More luck.

Which is a problem when people come to me for advice. At various times over the years, I’ve been approached by others asking how I ended up doing what I do, and what they could do to get similar work. This is impossible to answer on one level because so much of my experience was circumstantial coincidence (luck), not any grand plan on my part, and so the story, interesting or not, can’t be used as a blueprint. (And things change. Were I starting out today, I’d probably be making YouTube and TikTok videos, not writing, and would be less successful. Even my timing was lucky.)

But I do have some advice. I've noted many times that it’s easy to start something---a blog, a website, or a YouTube channel, whatever, anyone can do that---but the trick is to kee...