Gerry Heidenreich

I sat down at lunch today with a fellow INETA person, who started our conversation by asking me what I want to do when I grow up. I said I'm already doing it. I love what I do, I always have. I was selfish and pursued what excited me, and ended up here. I was raised to believe that I should graduate HS and move on and get a degree, then land a good job that pays me decent money for working 40 hours a week, blah blah blah... In my life it wasn't supposed to happen that way. I graduated HS, moved on to major in Math in a big University... I felt like I was moving against the current. The day I accepted a full-time job in a computer shop and stopped my schooling was the first time I felt like I was moving with the current.

I'm not good in a classroom. I'm good with books, and with a pen and a lot of paper.  I can hold my own behind a keyboard.  I'm good at these things because I enjoy them. I know what I like. Many of our fathers & most of their fathers did not follow what they liked. They worked 8-10 hours a day, often despising their jobs, so they could come home to their wives & kids and relax for a few hours, go to bed early, and do it all over again the next day. They moved against the current because it was in their nature, it was how they were raised; it was their work-ethic, engrained into them.

I'm married to a wonderful woman who is great at photography, but isn't sure what her passions are, other than her crazy husband and beautiful children. She has yet to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up. She wants to find her calling, but doesn't know where to start. My advice to her was this:

Start blogging. It doesn't matter what you talk about, just be true to yourself. Keep an eye on what you're writing about and eventually, you will start to recognize patterns in the subjects you're covering, the pages you're visiting and linking to, and if you're one of the lucky ones, you'll know what pages are linking to you. You will, by the nature of the weblog world, become part of a community. You will be part of a social network you didn't know existed, and certainly didn't know you belonged to. You will find your passions, and you will find your direction.

I think that the ideas in my Social Tagging, and Networking through Weblogs post should clean up nicely, and result in some insights on blogging as a social tool, and ultimately, a utility for personal success. We're in the Wild West right now, we've got open plains of undiscovered territory, and there's chaos that will someday be harnessed by some killer-app that leverages intelligent, subjective, context-aware technologies. In the meantime, stake your claims and let the communities grow.