Jeff Goins did a great episode of The Portfolio Life podcast a while back in which he talked about so-called ‘shadow careers’.
A shadow career is that line of work you go into that is ‘close’ to what you actually want to do, but not quite it.
I’ve written about this before, but to recap, if you want to be a model but you become a stylist, or if you want to be a racing driver but you become a pitstop mechanic then you have embarked on a shadow career.
It’s close to what you want to do but not quite it.
We can all understand the concept, but what was really interesting was what Goins said next. It was something along these lines:
‘When you’ve realised you are in a shadow career, you will of course move on. And what you move to next will also be a shadow career.’
I sometimes wonder if that isn’t exactly what I’ve done.
After all, my stated purpose all of the time that I’ve been publishing content on the internet is to be a writer.
Writing, as I have said constantly, is in my DNA. Literally, since my father is a writer too.
When I was a kid as young as four years old I would sit in the garden writing stories while my grandmother tended to the lawn and the roses.
As a teenager I read obsessively. And even in my ‘lost’ twenties (where I did very little of any use at all) I still wrote: long, self-indulgent memoirs that I later destroyed (unfortunately). Writing—the act of externalising my thoughts, feelings and fears through language—has always been a huge part of my life.
Well, it still is. And the good news is that I now write every single day, and I certainly write great deal more than I ever have before.
Having said that, as I find ways to make a living online to sustain my new (non-conventionally employed) life, I find that I am doing more and more things that aren’t writing.
Well, not ‘real’ writing anyway
For example, I spend a lot of time updating social media (Twitter, mainly). I also increasingly do ‘copywriting’ rather writing—sometimes my emails and posts take the form of sales letters (although I always try to keep the balance weighted towards ‘valuable’ content).
It’s writing, yes. But it’s not the literary sort of writing I really want to be doing.
To be fair, my published books don’t really merit that description either. That said, I have managed, particularly in 10X Happiness, Still In The Game and Fifty Shades of Game 1, to ‘sneak in’ what I regard as ‘better’ writing, in the sections of memoir that those titles include.
But when I am working on the more formulaic, commercial stuff that comes with the territory of this ‘job’ I’ve created for myself, I can’t help feeling that, yet again, I have stepped into another ‘shadow career’.
You see, when I was working my corporate jobs I needed to escape as a matter of urgency.
My dream (in common with many other people) was to be paid writing what I wanted to write.
But after years of trying and failing along the Paris Review, New Yorker path that literary fiction fanboys tend to follow, I decided I would have to compromise. And having always been an entrepreneurial sort of guy, I decided that online business was the best available direction open to me.
Nine months in to this strange journey of self-employment, I’m happy to report that I’m far, far happier (and busier) than I’ve ever been in my career before.
But am I actually doing it? That thing I always wanted to do?
Sort of . . . but not really.
If my aim was to sit in a room like Will Self and write long, incomprehensible faux-modernist novels, then I’m nor there yet.
If I did write such material it is unlikely that it would sell in sufficient quantities to save me from the ignominy of another corporate job.
So I’ve had to compromise, as I expect many people have to.
On the plus side, by the end of next year my business will have made seven figures, so at that point I’ll probably be able to take some time out and join Will at the typewriter.
Until then, it’s back to banging out the copy and social media content that keeps the money rolling in.
But the cognitive dissonance persists nonetheless.
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