At a work interview I was asked, “Tell me something about yourself that we do not know about you?” to which I fumbled the answer, big time, by hastily responding what could be inside my heart and launched recklessly to the top of my head “I’m a better guitar player than a card dealer!”
Now, of course, the worst thing that can happen to an interview is to turn it into an interrogation. Ideally you want to use this period to lift yourself up, sometimes you dig yourself a hole.
All I wanted to say was that I am better at being creative than being a cog in a machine. What’s contradicting about the statement is that I’ve been dealing for 14 years and there is not enough substantive output to support that I am indeed who I claim to be. This is the wisdom behind the follow-up question “How bad must I be at A since being supposedly better at B led me nowhere?” to which I really have no answer.
What’s amazing about the job was it enabled me to acquire gear. It’s also a convenient spot to bury your head when your dream starts to demand time and courage.
I just remember that I can afford gear now. As with basketball, I apply the mantra “let your gear compensate for your game!” Having said that, I never wanted to immerse geekily on specs and details of the gear. I felt that technical knowledge about single coils or flyknits help me improve how I shoot or how I strum. It’s a confused dynamic that made me somewhat a good resource for initial info but not for in-depth knowledge.
That was a mistake. In this industry, if you let yourself, the gaming area is one wide plateau where years burn for no significance and that would be fine. Same with guitar playing, as a hobby, you can be good enough never to consult guitar tabs (or in my case, “Songhits”) and that would be fine.
“But then, at some point, you’d have to feed your soul. You’d eventually face a question that you can’t immediately answer, an equation you can’t solve. I thought I was outside looking at the infinite horizon… Then I stumbled on to a door… So I opened it…”
When these type of epiphany happens, you can’t really regret the lost time, you are just grateful that you still have time to learn a little bit more.
I really just wanted to say that I am a better guitar player because the job afforded me not only gear, but time… to get better.
danDAman 