A restless soul (aka "What I want to do when I grow up" part 1)

I'm 30 years old and I don't know what I want to do with my life. I have two masters degrees, but don't know what I'm actually qualified to do. I'm passionate about a lot of different things and can't work out how to focus this.

Over the last couple of years, I feel like I've got to know myself a lot better. I've discovered that I can have a short attention span when it comes to interests, and so I work better doing projects where I work intensively on one thing for a period of time, then move on to something else. For example, my photo a day project, making 1000 paper cranes, creating the origami and resolution trees, my Deconsumerism project. Since accepting that this is how I work, I've felt a lot more at peace with myself and how I work. Instead of seeing it as a weakness, I've seen it as an opportunity to get involved in a lot of different things, and along the way, work out what it is that I take with me from each of these projects (a love of photography, an enthusiasm for random acts of kindness, a passion about sustainable living).

How this characteristic relates to a job, I haven't yet worked out. I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm probably not going to have a classic "career" like most people do, but I don't mind about this as long as I have a job I enjoy and interests me. Whether that's going involve a number of different jobs or one constantly changing and evolving one, I don't know.

As an recap, here are the jobs I've done over the last 5 years:
- Hardware designer, programming microchips for digital set top box chips
- Care worker for elderly people
- PA/support worker for a young woman
- Sustainability intern at an interactive science centre
- Refurbishment consultant/project developer for a community project
- Energy advisor for a local charity

Each of these, I've enjoyed aspects of, but ultimately none of them have quite fitted what I'm looking for. I did my last job as an energy advisor for almost two years, but by the end was really ready to leave - I really enjoyed the aspect of the job where I could see that I was tangibly helping people and changing their lives, but ultimately by the end it didn't provide me with any kind of challenge or variety (something I crave in a job). I feel like I was reasonably good at the job and hit the targets that were set, but it didn't really use me to the best of my abilities.

I also have a wide range of interests and values, and I'm trying to work out what I want to focus on for a job, and what I can fulfill in my spare time. At the moment, talking about what I could do as a job flits around so many different and varied possibilities that it's hard to see any coherence in it. Part of the problem is that I'm pretty adaptable and pick things up quickly, meaning that I can lend my hand to a lot of things with some degree of competence. But I'd like to find something that I can be GREAT at, and perhaps even find a job that can hold my interest for more than two years.

Part of this year for me is about spending time thinking and working out some of this stuff. When you're busy working and socialising it can be hard to find time to do this, and easy to just keep going down whatever road you're already down. Equally I know that it'd be easy to get caught up in the work and travelling I'm doing this year, and not really spend any more time mulling over this. So I'm trying to be proactive in my thinking and make sure I put aside time to try and work out some of these questions...

It's been an interesting week. In Halifax, I sat in on a meeting with Sophia and a few other people who were planning a project, and they did an exercise where they went through each of their strengths, skills, resources, values and outcomes they wanted. Inspired by this, I've started listing each of these for myself, hoping this will help me find some coherence. I also did an online strengths test (the results of which I've taken with a slight pinch of salt). However, it was surprisingly enlightening, highlighting one strength which I'd really not recognised before (in fact it was my top rated one, and was surprisingly accurate) and another that I don't think I'd recognised as a "strength".

In addition, I've spent the last couple of days with my friend Petro up in Tatamagouche, and we both seem to be going through a similar searching process. We've spent a lot of time talking through some of the questions and mulling over the possible answers, and it's been great being able to talk it over with someone who feels the same. I'm not sure I'm any closer to a conclusion, but it's helped me dig a bit deeper... To be continued!