A quick thought:

There's no way in hell I'm wasting this life.

In my What The Hell Do I Do When I Graduate class (Thinking Like a Working Writer), we've had a handful of people come in and talk about their jobs. Electronic Arts, The Wall Street Journal, Google, the non-profit flavor of the day. And I got to thinking—I refuse.

Graduation—I'm six weeks out. Everyone around me is flipped. What am I going to do? Will Facebook hire me? I'll work for two years to pad my resumé then I'll really start living.

And to me that's no way to live. And to me it sounds like poison. And I refuse to do it.

The more I heard about writing filler articles for The Wall Street Journal, writing copy for startups, padding and waiting and curbing, the more I think—don't you get it? We have One Shot at this thing called life. Only one. And am I going to wake up when I'm eighty and say, I've had a decent run, it's been a pretty good life, or am I going to say with deep laugh lines in my face and roughed-up hands and a gimp leg—What a rush. 


I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate. But if that means waiting tables, Fine! If that means working on a farm, Good! The one thing I refuse to compromise is my writing time. Because that's my thing, that's what makes me happy, and I want to be an author, and I want to make a living off my writing, and all else is waste.