... this going back to school business. I have to keep reminding myself of that. Don't get me wrong, I love school. Madly. I love to organize papers and label things and buy books and take notes. I love all the motions of that; however, these academic habits do not pardon the fact that most of my scholastic achievements have consisted of high levels of bullshit. As much as I love school, I am an agonizingly slow reader. It is torturous really, to sit down to the prospect of a 200 page reading assignment. So I learned how to bullshit. And write good papers. I learned to glean the important themes and, most importantly, how to regurgitate the concepts that the teachers were obviously trying to get us to get. I graduated from an Ivy League university with a double major and a 3.8 GPA. And I am ashamed to admit that I probably actually completed only 30-40% of my work.
But this is different. I've enrolled in a business certificate program at UW Foster Business School. It'll meet two nights a week for six months and, apparently, the workload is going to be enormous. In undergrad, I was obsessed with grades and ranking and achievement. That's not going to be the case this time around - because many of these subjects (finance, accounting, investment) will be so foreign to me that my bullshitting skills will be next to powerless, but also because this is more like vocational school for me. I don't need to be the best student in the class. I just need to learn some things that will be useful when I pull them out of my pocket and shine light on them in the big, bad, real world.
You see, the end game here is not school. Or even a good job. My goal in all of this, the possibility I am creating, is a new lifestyle for myself. I want to use business to create a lifestyle that allows me flexibility, independence and financial freedom. Likely, this will be through a new business or another sort of entrepreneurial endeavor. Likely, this will be online. Likely, I am speaking now of things I know little or nothing about. But I am not going to let that stop me.
I love my teaching job. I love my artistic pursuits and my professional life as a performer and writer. And I will still love them when I am also running my own business which will let me travel for six months out of the year and exercise all my other muscles - like management, marketing and strategy. This is going to be good. This is going to be really good. And school is just one avenue I'm paving into this dream.
