How I got my wish

Back when I was 20-21, I was going through the typical "But I don't know what I want to do in my life!" angst. I talked for a while to a wonderful therapist in Sacramento named Steve Cotta--who, I am sad to say, died just a few years ago--and he put me through a lot of exercises to help me discover what I wanted to be. I did all kinds of tests and homework and came up with some goals.

I thought I'd lost all the paperwork when I got divorced, but I just found some of it. I remember that there was a complex questionnaire that Steve sent off and had evaluated for various classic jobs. I'm pretty sure the paperwork for that one's gone, but I remember that it said my desire to be a life insurance salesman was a -4.

But the one thing that stuck with me most was an exercise on a dittoed sheet (most of these were dittos) entitled "The Ideal Job." This one just turned up again. The instructions were simple: "Write 10 criteria for your ideal job. What components you would like that job to have. (money, benefits, etc.)" There were ten numbered blank lines. I filled it out then. There were no "right" answers; this was just marking what I wanted.

I remember finding this in 1986, 10 years after I'd done it, and thinking how wonderful it was that I'd called my shots. I was making a lot of money as a freelance technical writer and pretty much everything on that list had come true. Looking at it again, it's still pretty much true.

Here are the ten things I wrote:

1. Work that can be done at home
2. Flexibility of schedule
3. Well Paid
4. Career options
5. Advancement possibilities
6. Intelligence counts
7. Situation where one can socialize and work at same time
8. Work that I like
9. Moderate work load
10. Occasional peak loads

(I do note, with some chagrin, how childlike my handwriting was then and, truth be told, it's really no better now. Oh, well....) 

How I got my wish