Jay-Z didn't apply for a job. There is no job application for rapper, record label exec, basketball team owner, sports agent. Neither did Spike Jonze. Or Bob Burnquist. What each of these cats are doing with their lives didn't exist as a job you can apply for. Their lives and livelihoods exist because they created them the way they wanted them to be.
Creativity and dreams and livelihood all tie together somehow. Or they should. Our creative impulses, the tangents we follow, the paths we explore--there has to be a way to harness them, to use them, to incorporate them into how we make a living: the job search, the career decisions, the life direction. It should be one larger whole. How can I work them altogether? Find the perspective that sees them all at the same time.
Isn't it those people, the Jay-Z's, the Spike Jonzes, the Burnquists, who figure this out, that meet success head on, on their own terms?
Don't get me wrong, there are jobs I've applied for at the National Aquarium, the Smithsonian, Washington College and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation that I'd do backflips through hoops to get. I'm not in a position to just follow my bliss. But it seems like the people who change work, who change the world, who build their dreams into the world around them, and make a grand living in the process, are those who didn't just apply for a job to do so.
Yesterday I went for an afternoon run. It had been raining all day and water was flowing hard and fast under a foot bridge on the rail trail near our house. It would not be denied. There is something to being that water. Being water flowing downhill, not to be stopped. Jay-Z, Jonze and Burnquist get it. They know what it is to be coming down the mountain.
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