Strawburry Miwk

I’ve been told a great deal of conflicting advice in my lifetime concerning any career aspirations. I’ve been told it’s ok to go into college “undecided,” it’s ok not to know exactly what you want to do or be by your mid-twenties, it’s ok to do one thing only to jump around to do another…and even another. And I’ve been told constantly by people older than myself, “heck, I still don’t know what to do!”

This kind of advice is always told with a sort of bittersweet pat on the back, with a gleam in one’s eye upon seeing a young person such as myself with still so much future left ahead of me to fill with whatever hopes and dreams I may. It’s the sort of advice people give hoping they can help you more than they’ve ever been helped themselves, perhaps. Well, this advice was perfectly fine to toss around in 2004 when I was a freshman in college, enrolled as an English major largely because English/Reading was always my strong point in high school, and less than guaranteed A’s and B’s would have been scarlet letters for me. This advice was fine to reinforce throughout my college career when I picked up an illustration job at the local paper that later blossomed into a design/editor job. This advice was fine to continue to praise me with when secondary education turned out not to be my thing, and I picked up a minor in Information Technology Studies instead, delving into web design and even winning an award for a research paper on Internet subcultures. Yes, throughout all these accomplishments, big and small, profound and useless, however varied they all were, it was fine for everyone and myself to say it was fine to do it all and be decently good at it all without a damn clue of what specifically I wanted to be through it all.

Yes, all that was fine between August 2004 and early 2008. But that flower previously blossoming in an open garden now only has the dirt dusted in-between the cracks on a sidewalk to grow in now…melodramatically speaking, that is. Ok, maybe it’s more like some bucket of dirt in a dimly-lit windowsill that the cat keeps threatening to knock over with its tail, but still..

I don’t look on much, if anything, in my educational career with regret, per se. But comparing myself to some of my friends who have had more–as I call it– streamlined educational careers, I do feel a bit…jealous. Misguided. And perhaps what I find most bitingly ironic about said friends is that they, too, considered themselves to be in the “undecided” crowd. They had, however, the courage–or the cowardice, depending on how you interpret them and their lives–to focus on one thing they knew they could do well, and to do just that.

Part of my “Strawburry Miwk” empire is a Twitter account that I use primarily to collect quotes, and one quote I discovered after graduation (again with the haunting irony) was from none other than Plato: “Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several, he will fail to achieve distinction in any.”

This was said at a time when you could mend shoes really well, or build houses really well, or drive a manure cart really well and make a living out of it. Few people had the resources or the time to try multiple things, and the technology to excel in more than one thing didn’t even exist. When we think of technology today, we focus a lot on HD TVs, MP3 players, game consoles and other nifty things that revolve around entertainment, but we often neglect to see how even these devices, coupled with expanded mobile networks, faster data processing and increased information creation, storage and transmission, have exponentially increased the amount of work we can do, and decreased the time and manpower that work takes to get done. You can no longer expect to get by just knowing how to mend shoes–such would be entirely laughable. You need to know how to build an identity for your shoe line, how to manage your business’s finances, how to keep up with emerging trends and develop new shoe designs, how to utilize the web and social media to get the net buzzing about your shoes in some whacky viral campaign, and how to accurately log your time and data use through it all to keep on task and moving forward, forward, forward.

In today’s world, you are already assumed to be able to do many things well.

Yet, what I’m realizing now is the key word in this quote is “distinction.” I laughed when I first read this quote, thinking highly of everything I had accomplished in my fairly short time alive on this planet. Yet, since graduating in May 2008 in a job market that’s less than hospitable to today’s “undecided” Renaissance Man, I’ve come to realize…the joke’s on me. I can do a lot of things. I can do many things well. But I feel as of yet I lack any real sense of distinction. With resumes flying past employer’s desks left and right with much of the same skill set as I have, what do I have that makes myself…more distinct?

I’ve had in my mind for a while a vague cloud of generally hazy rough ideas in an ambiguous fog of thought of what I wanted to do with this blog. I wanted to write about the things I’m interested in or that affect the things I’m interested in–web design, illustration, multimedia, social networking, writing, grammar and linguistics, etc.–to better my knowledge of them, especially in a professional sense, but I was just never sure of where exactly to start. This entry seems like a perfect springboard into what this blog will be about; My ongoing quest to achieve distinction. (And just…generally anything I think is important enough to blog about…distinctively.)

Do I go back to school? Do I continue to find jobs in what I can currently do to expand my portfolio? Do I lean more on the focus of my college degree? Do I take a new direction entirely? Do I even stay in this state, in this country, or do I go somewhere else entirely? How will I ever find any of this out?

That is what this blog, and your comments, will be here for.

Just what the f*** is Strawburry Miwk?