I worry that people sell their souls for false security, that they bury the essence of who they are in order to fit into a world they don’t belong in. In other words, they grow up.

My wife and I often joke that we don’t know what we want to be when we grow up. I think we have it backwards. I think we shouldn’t have grown up in the first place.

Throughout our lives, society pressures us to fall into certain patterns: sports and other activities throughout the school years, followed by college, career, marriage, kids, grandkids, retirement. Preferably in that order. Certain jobs are appropriate for certain people.  If you’re smart (and wealthy, usually), you should be a doctor, lawyer, engineer or college professor. If you’re not so smart, off you go to make an hourly wage: factory worker, secretary, custodian and fast-food worker. Of course, then there are the jobs society thinks are better for one gender than the other. How often do you see a male secretary or a female auto mechanic?

Following these patterns is considered the grown-up, responsible thing to do. It seems to work for a lot of people – maybe even most – but definitely not for some.  For some it finds us at middle age wondering what the heck we’re doing with our lives. We find ourselves in jobs that are sucking our souls. At the time, taking these jobs seemed the responsible, adult thing to do. It paid the bills, right?

That’s what society wants for us, but what do WE want? We become so obsessed with doing the right thing, we totally ignore what’s right for us. We’re taught to repress what makes us happy in favor of what makes us responsible. Why can’t we be taught how to find and nurture our essential selves instead of discovering what skills we possess that society might find useful? In the end, why should we care what society thinks of our chosen vocations as long as we aren’t a burden and what we do doesn’t harm anyone?

So, what would have happened if we didn’t grow up? What if we followed a path that was soul enriching, but not necessarily well paying? Naturally, we have to support ourselves, but so many people I know take and keep horrible jobs because we’re told throughout our lives that it’s the right thing to do. What if we were taught that the right thing is to pay attention to our inner voices and to follow our passions? To do something that touches and enriches our souls?

I think we’re taught not to listen to the inner voice, but the outer ones that teach us what society considers responsible behavior. Shouldn’t it be more responsible to figure out who we are first?

Some career gurus say, “follow your passion and the money will follow.” I’m not sure that’s always true, but for many people I know, we’ve submerged our passions so deeply we don’t even know what they are anymore. An unfulfilling job can suck our energy to the point where we are no longer capable of having fun, because we don’t remember what fun is!

I’ve been struggling with this for a couple years now. I have a lot of interests but nothing I consider a true passion. Maybe you’ll have better luck. Take some time and try to remember what used to get you all fired up, what really tickled your fancy back in the days before you decided to grow up. Seriously, I can’t remember. But like I said, maybe you’ll have better luck.

Bull.

I know this is nit-picking, but if it’s not about the destination, why are you going? Sure, you shouldn’t be so focused on where you’re going that you forget to enjoy the road, but come on! Where you’re going better damn well be worth it to go to all the trouble of getting there.

Grasping for something is part of what life’s all about. We need something to reach for, a destination, to give us a reason for being here, a reason to go on living. I know some of us focus too much on the goals and forget to enjoy the experience of how we get there and the lessons learned along the way. But why did someone decide the process is more important than the end result? Why can’t it be equally important? Without somewhere to go, you’re not going to have a journey!

Maybe we need to say, “It’s not just the destination, it’s the journey, too.” As with everything, there needs to be balance. You need somewhere nice to go AND you need to enjoy the trip. Without both those things, there really is no point, is there?

So, I figured I’d write it down. Maybe it would help me focus. My great idea was to make it the 5Ws of marketing, like the 5Ws of journalism, only different. I couldn’t make it work. I ended up with What, Who, Why, How, What, How and How instead of Who, What, When, Where and Why. Doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it makes a heck of a lot more sense.

What are you selling? Sure, you might not strictly be selling something, but you’re still trying to get people to buy into something – a product, a service, an idea, that kind of thing.

Who wants what you’re selling? There’s no point trying to sell to someone who doesn’t want it. It just doesn’t make sense.

Why do they want what you’re selling? Benefits. You have to tell them how your product or service will make their lives better.

How do you communicate with them? You’ve got all these reasons why they need your services and now you have to tell them about it. What do they read? What do they watch? Should you use direct mail? If you’re trying to reach senior citizens, a banner ad on a music download site is probably not the answer.

What steps do they have to take to buy what you’re selling? Maybe they need to pick up the phone and call you. Or go to your web site. Or go to the store. When they call you, what next? If they’re on your site, how do they buy?

How do you get them to take those steps? Each step has to lead to the next one. Someone sees your ad in the paper. What they see has to make them want to call you, go to your store or visit your web site, depending on your product or service. Once in your store, let’s say, they have to be enticed to buy. That could mean a great storefront, a comfortable interior, well-displayed, attractive merchandise or all of the above. Everything you do has to make them want to take that next step toward buying.

How do you follow up? In this what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world, you must follow up, in some cases whether they’re purchased or not. Develop a mailing list (snail or e, depends on your audience), send a newsletter, create special offers or simply run more ads. If you make a good first impression and you keep reminding them how wonderful you are, chances are you’ll have repeat customers.

So, how does this relate to my business (obligatory link here)? I’ll get back to you on that.

I’ve been lucky. The only one who’s put up resistance so far is my dog.

There’s a room in our house designated as my home office or “den”, as we like to call it. It wasn’t friendly to the way I work, so a few weeks ago I did some rearranging. I hope to be spending a lot of time in there working my freelance mojo, so I wanted to make it more comfortable.

Unfortunately, I forgot to clear my plans with Shadow, who also uses that room as a “den”.

I hadn’t been using it much, so Shadow decided it was a quiet, comfy place to sleep. Most of the time he’d sleep on the futon. That was one of the things I moved. It’s still there, but now it’s 90 degrees from its original position. I don’t think he’s been on it since.

At first, he was so freaked he didn’t want to go into the room at all. For the first few nights, he begged to go outside or on the porch ‒ anywhere but that room. Eventually, he’d go in, but just barely far enough to say he was inside. I don’t think I could have closed the door without hitting some part of him. Sure, there are other places in the house he could have slept ‒ we keep him inside at night ‒ but he wasn’t considering other options.

It’s getting better. He’s sleeping farther inside the room, but never, as far as I can tell, on the futon.

I feel guilty for disrupting his universe like that, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do, you know? Even if not everyone is 100 percent behind you.

If you color inside the lines, you’re a structured, follow-the-rules thinker. But, if you color outside the lines, you’re more creative, a free thinker, someone who doesn’t like to be constrained by the boundaries we’re given.

Me, I would have loved to color inside the lines. I tried. I really did. I just didn’t have the hand-eye coordination to keep the crayon from crossing the thick black border. Like it had a will of its own. I hated coloring. I also had a hard time figuring what colors to use. I liked it better when I came across the rare color-by-numbers books. I still couldn’t keep inside the lines, though. Most coloring books also had connect-the-dot pictures. Those were great for a linear thinker and didn’t require near as much patience as coloring.

Now, though, I think I would approach it differently. First of all, I would scan the image, select the area I want a particular color and fill it with that color. You design geeks know what I’m saying. That eliminates the whole hand-eye thing altogether.

More importantly, I would look at the picture differently. Sure, I’d want to still try to stay inside the lines, but I might not be content with the picture I’m given. I might want to create some of my own lines to fill with the colors I choose.

It’s just like that with employment. Sure, I know I need to make money to live, but I don’t have to stay inside the lines of corporate America to do that. Since the industrial revolution, our society says we need to get an education and then get a job. Those lines are blurring for many people. Some are combining learning and career so there’s hardly any way to tell the difference. And they’re having one hell of a time.

I don’t think I can be that fluid about it. I still need things to be better defined, so I need the lines. But lucky for me, I don’t have to use the ones someone else put there. I can create my own structure, my own lines – whatever I need to feel secure, yet free at the same time. That’s the theory, anyway.

She’s right. It is. Working solo is about doing something that interests you, learning from it and using it to create even more new experiences, ones you can hopefully make money from. Home schooling is about learning more from life experiences than from books and using those experiences to have a more fulfilling life. The comparison is so good, I wanted to steal it and take sole credit. Unfortunately, someone beat us to it.

In Free Agent Nation, author Daniel Pink explores the world of solo workers, those who abandon the corporate ladder in favor of working independently. (I never liked climbing anyway. Bad for the knees.) It’s a good book, one that makes you think differently about education, employment and what it means to make a living.

A free agent, according to Pink, thinks about life as one long learning process. So, in much the same way that traditional schooling prepares us for life as a corporate drone, home schooling breeds an entrepreneurial mindset by encouraging students to pursue those subjects that interest them most. It’s no wonder that home schooling has moved from the hippie-freak fringes a couple decades ago to being almost mainstream.

Education is changing in other ways, too, Pink says. Aside from specialized professions like doctors and lawyers, many jobs don’t even require a college degree, despite conventional wisdom. There are other ways to learn the ins and outs of a job, like online training and the original on-the-job training program, apprenticeship.

Like I said, a different way of looking at things. Free Agent Nation gets the Uncle Ron Seal of Approval.

I’ve been researching blogging for over a year now. Many use it as a way to make some side cash and, in some cases, as their main source of income. So, I’m blogging. But everything I’ve read tells me I’m doing it all wrong. Here’s what I mean.

1. No specific target audience. The gurus of the blogosphere say that in order to have a successful blog, it has to be geared to a certain topic. That way, the people who are interested in that topic will read the blog. The experts say it should be something you’re either passionate about or have a great deal of knowledge of. We already know I’m not good at figuring that out.

2. No SEO-friendly key words. Search Engine Optimization. That means when someone Googles a topic, they use certain words. My job as a blogger is to make sure each post is filled with as many of those key words as I can squeeze in. So, if you write a blog about horror flicks, you might want to fill each post with words like “scary”, “movie”, “zombies”, “decapitation”, “machete” . . . you get the idea. So what do I expect people to Google looking for a blog like mine? “The ramblings of a middle-age cranky bastard”?

3. No ad revenue. When you’re trying to make money on a blog, one way is to sell advertising space to people who want to sell things to your audience. You can sell space directly to the advertisers or there are services like Google AdSense that choose what ads run on your blog by your key words. With AdSense, you get paid every time one of your readers clicks on an ad. But how can you sell ads when there is no specific target and no specific industry trying to sell things to that target? No specific focus, no key words, no advertisers.

4. No way someone will hire me after reading this crap. Another way a blog can make money is to use it as a marketing tool for another venture. In my case, freelance writing. Theory is, if you show your expertise in a certain area and become the “go-to” person in that niche, people will hire you. One way to prove expertise is by blogging. All I’m proving is that I’m fluent in “cranky”.

5. No products to sell. Once you’ve become a recognized expert, you start creating and selling stuff. Most bloggers create e-books, audio files and video that people can download for $10 to $80. Some even publish real books that you can buy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Even others create training packages for hundreds – and thousands – of dollars so they can share their wisdom.

6. No marketing. You’re supposed to market your blog. You write articles on web sites that link back to yours, or frequently comment on blogs and in forums that relate to your topic or interest. It’s hard to know what blogs and forums cranky people hang out in. It’s not like I can Google it (see #2).

7. No “list” posts. Apparently blog readers eat up any post that has a list. Like “10 reasons not to starch your shorts”, “5 ways to get the most out of a kumquat” or “7 reasons this is the worst blog ever”.

I’m hoping some of these things will change after I find my rhythm and get a few more posts under my belt. Maybe by then, I’ll figure out what my point is.

Miracles happen.

While it’s not impossible to raise enough money to open a store, start a restaurant or begin manufacturing left-handed thingamajigs, it’s not easy. It also can be risky. You can lose your house, your friends, your family – even your dog.

So, what to do. In the end, you gotta sell something. Your talents, your time. Anything but your soul. If you’re working a 9 to 5, there’s already a lien on that.

The experts say “find your passion”. Do what you love, they say, and the money will follow. I love drinking beer and watching bad sci-fi movies all day. If I figure out a way to get paid doing that, I’ll let you know.

Another thing, our educational/work system is geared to drive the passion out of you, to drain your desire for finding things that are fun to do. The whole “go here, do this” structure doesn’t encourage doing what you like, just what you’re told. Dad always says I was a happy kid. Then I went to school.

So, I’m still struggling with the what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up question. Until I find freedom, I won’t be able to find my passion. Until I find my passion, I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.

So, what to do. What can I do? Over the years, I’ve developed pretty good skills in writing, editing, marketing, photography and graphic design. The one I do best is writing. And, I think, that’s the one that’s most marketable. So, I started Wordsmith. I developed a web site and started slowly – oh, so slowly! – to reach out to prospective clients. Still trying to get the rhythm of the whole thing.

It hasn’t been easy: designing a logo, business card, letterhead, web site and blog; coming up with a marketing strategy; learning the technical end of setting up a web site and blog – all while keeping my full-time gig as a corporate copywriter and editor.

The jobs haven’t exactly been rolling in. At this stage, it’d practically be a miracle if they did. Even so, it’s hard not to feel discouraged. And trapped.

“I don’t wanna go to school.”

That’s what my wife and I say when we’re dreading going to work. You know what I mean. Drag yourself out of bed. Groggily clean up and put your clothes on. Have something to eat, if you have time. If you have kids, you have to help them get ready for school, too. They might as well get used to it.

You have your good clothes, just like for school. You have to make sure you have money for lunch. Or you take something. Only you stick it in your briefcase instead of using a brown bag.

You find your way into work, by car, train, cab, whatever. If you carpool like I do, doesn’t it feel like you’re waiting for the school bus? I even told my carpool buddy he might as well paint his Kia yellow. You make it just in time for the first bell and shuffle your way to whatever serves as your homeroom, a cubie, office, cash register or burger grill. Attendance is mandatory. The teacher hands out your assignments and you get to work. A few hours later, it’s lunch. Here, you do have more flexibility than your school days, but not much. Whether you have a half hour or an hour, it’s always too short. You have to eat, maybe run errands and, most of all, try to regroup from the hours of schoolwork.

After lunch, it’s back to the grind. A few hours later, you get to go home. Exhausted. If you’re lucky, you managed to get everything you needed to done. Otherwise, homework.

It’s part of a pattern. First, they send you to grade school, then you advance to middle school and, finally, high school. You’re trained to do what you’re told and when you’re told to do it. It’s perfect training for the workday world.

The lucky ones go straight to their jobs or into the military. Lucky? Sure. Because college is a cruel joke. You’re finally making most of your own decisions. Even going to class is an option, if you don’t mind flunking out. You can pretty much make your own schedule and mold your life the way you want it.

Then what happens? You graduate and go to your job. Where you’re told what to do and when to do it. Mean, huh? A taste of freedom, then back to the grind.

I don’t wanna go to school no more.

Options. The lottery? Not likely. Inherit millions? Nope. Not enough there even if you shake the family tree by its roots. Climb the corporate ladder high enough so I can make my own decisions? Better odds with the lottery.

Strike out on my own? Scary. But possible. Without much to invest, my best bet is to sell one of my talents freelance. Since I’ve been writing in one form or another all my professional life, that seems my best bet.

So, I’m venturing into the untested (by me or anyone I know) waters of becoming a freelance writer. Part time for now. I’m not brave enough to stake my paycheck on it. Not yet.