I’ve heard it said that the secret to success is figuring out what you love to do and then find a way to make money doing it.
Of course, when you think about it, that makes alot of sense. If you are doing something that you love to do, then alot of the things that are common goals of working become secondary. A perfect example of that is making money. Alot of people work to make money so they can do things they like to do. If you are already doing something you like to do, you will probably spend less money pursuing other things that you would like to do. IOW, you will probably have less expensive tastes.
Without thinking it through in advance, I fell into something I love to do. I discovered in college, that not only was I good at my chosen profession, but that I also liked it. What I learned from teaching in college was that my students’ ability at computer programming was largely dependent on whether or not they liked it. I don’t believe that all professions will distinguish between those who do like it and those who don’t to the degree that programming does.
This time of year many homeschoolers are ‘off’ of school as they somewhat follow the societal school calendar. One of the beauties of unschooling is that there is no ‘off’ time and no ‘on’ time. The closest thing we have to that is learning for the fun of it. There is learning which we do which falls into the category of life skills. I learn things for work. We learn things to improve our life, our home, etc. But sometimes we explore in an area where there is no direct association with life skills. To me, that is our ‘off’ time.
If you’ve been following along in this and Andrea’s blog, you’ll know I’ve been working pretty flat out on getting our old house ready to go on the market. Usually when I get to the computer at night I’m tired enough that I don’t feel like writing. In the same vein, I’m having a bit of trouble transitioning from one thought to another.
The closing thought I’ve had for this post over the last few days has been that I hope that all 4 of the kids (Addison, Sarah, Meaghan & Emma) learn the principle I opened the post with in the course of their homeschooling ‘education’. Unschooling caters particularly well to that because they will have far more opportunities to discover what it is they love to do. Hopefully, we will provide them with avenues to discover how to make money doing it.
Great points. And I agree that unschooling fits with this philosophy. In fact, many of the arguments I hear against is are of the type “but kids have to learn to do things they don’t like because we all have to do some stuff we don’t like to get where we want to be”. It seems to me that once you recognize the relationship between a particular task (that might be unpleasant or just plain hard work) and a goal that you want and that you know will make you happy, then this becomes less of a problem.
Nicely said. I hope my kids learn that too. It is a message most people don’t get sent in today’s world I think. Thanks for posting about it.
Too tired to blog every night?! I guess rehabbing really is exhausting.
joVE – Definitely. At least in my experience.
kim – I suspect there are alot of adults in our society who don’t believe it. I think the sleeping on air matresses may have something to do with being tired
yeah, I love programming too. I even love support – problem solving to a deadline is right up my street. Was there ever a time with any of your kids that you worried that they weren’t going to find something they enjoyed, or a phase where they didn’t seem happy with unschooling?
jax – to the first, I suppose there will always some anxiety toward that. But when compared to many other concerns we’ve had with life in general, it’s pretty insignificant.
To the second, yes and no: yes, at times at least one of them would prefer that we made educational choices for him/her (but if we did that we would also have to provide external motivation toward those goals/objectves) and no, I haven’t had the sense from any of them (excepting what I’ve just mentioned) that they would prefer it any other way.
As a software developer I will agree with you on the point about liking what you do can make you better at it and you will enjoy your work more.
But, after a few years, I ran into a situation where I started to hate programming because the stress of the job wore me out.
Eventually, I just quit one day. I had no job lined up to go to, I just quit. After a few weeks, a friend of mine and I started working on a new online service offering and programming was fun again and I got to be more creative than on my corporate job.
We now home school both our children and part of their education includes the fact that we don’t follow the school year exactly. We own 11 time shares and we do a lot of travel in the fringe seasons (cheaper and less crowded).
The other part is extolling the joys of being self employed and how family, education and financial preparedness far outweighs going with societal norms.
When my kids are sitting on the beach in Mexico or Spain (or Aruba this year) in November and going over their Spanish school work or working out some ideas for a social studies paper, we remind them that their friends are stuck in a boring class room in snowy Minnesota. They are eager to keep their grades up to a level that exceeds state standards under threat of having to go back to public school.