Wouldn’t it be nice to be yourself for a living? You would spend every moment doing something you wanted to be doing. You would personally like and care about every person with whom you interacted; and they would feel the same way about you. You would be where you wanted to be, when you wanted to be there. Yet magically, every one of those actions, and every one of those relationships, would operate within a beautiful system that gave you financial security, and an overall happy, healthy, and wealthy life.
It’s called Being Yourself for a Living; and while it’s been done before – but reserved to those of massive celebrity and resources – it’s becoming more feasible for more people each and every day. Technology has brought us channels that allow us to express our unique personalities, to share our unique knowledge and experiences, and to explore our curiousities.
You may have just one burning passion. Some may say that BYFL will be easier for you; but not necessarily. In today’s world, boundless curiousity is once again an asset. You’ll have to know a little HTML at the least. The Renaissance Person is back.
It will start with a blurry flurry of snowflakes. “You lack focus.” But eventually those snowflakes stick together. Technology has brought us feedback mechanisms by which to see just which of those snowflakes stick. You now have a snowball, and the ground upon which you stand has been blanketed. Start rolling!
Hi, my name is Kadavy, Inc.. What is your name?
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Brent said,
December 1, 2009 @ 4:32 pm
Provocative post — but is it sustainable in the aggregate? Can everyone be herself? And don’t we have to presuppose an alternative to performance in this utopia? (This is something I always wonder about when urged to “be (my/your)self”: what or who was I being previously and in what concrete ways ought I adjust my behavior to better suit this person’s idea of what/who I am?) I am wondering if the idea is constitutively limited in socioeconomic ways, access to media (both producing and consuming) etc. For a lot of people the goal is not to express uniqueness but to perform conformism. In most fields, I would wager, the performance of conformism is far more lucrative than the expression of uniqueness (“idiosyncrasy” in the pejorative).
What’s BYFL? Bring Your Free Lunch? Be Your Finest Leprechaun?
This shouldn’t sound so negative. You might make me learn HTML. I mean my Spanish is mostly gone so why not pick up something else?
But finally (to return to being a prick), I wonder about this basic schism in the formula: be / yourself. I’m speaking somewhat from experience here, but I think the relevance might be broad: when one goes into one’s own field, starts engaging that “one burning passion” or what-have-you, very suddenly it happens that there is no outside any longer. Or perhaps no “time off.” Where “being yourself” had been a break from the performance of job duties, it now becomes a job in itself, and I wonder if there is something in the self (or maybe just the late-capitalist self) that rebels from this kind of use. For example, where once a party was simply a party (admittedly maybe this situation never obtained), now it is a networking opportunity. Where once your passion for the poetry of Fernando Pessoa required no justification, it now comes under scrutiny from every previously-unimaginable angle. (“You like Pessoa? But you haven’t come to terms with his incipient fascism???”)
None of these comments should be taken as rebuttals, just acts of problematizing and being a dick, generally.
Chadwick said,
December 1, 2009 @ 8:39 pm
Well, if you need time “off”, you are not being yourself. Why would you want time off from the greatest thing in the world? Funny thing is, society has conditioned us to believe that exploring the world, learning about new cultures and ideas, etc. is taking time “off”. Newsflash: this is who we ARE! We are animals, and we like to roam. It is sitting in an office all day doing mindless work that is unnatural. Man is meant to experiment, to dabble, to probe, to make mistakes, to have great fortune–all of these things are being ourselves.
By concentrating on stuff such as wealth, you assume it is the greatest good. But isn’t the greatest good happiness? Many (sometimes myself included) belief that wealth brings happiness and that is why we pursue it. But it turns out, wealth or not, the thing that matters most for happiness is just being ourselves. I had the opportunity be surrounded by very wealthy people in the most wealthy city in the world (NYC), and saw that, in the end, these people were not satisfied inside. Because the work they were doing did not RESONATE with them. That is what I am trying to find.
And a favorite quote:
You were born an original. Don’t die a copy. ~John Mason
Brent said,
December 1, 2009 @ 8:47 pm
Thank you for the news flash, Chadwick. It had not occurred to me that one could find happiness outside of wealth. Seriously, though, if society conditions you to think about time “off” in the way you describe, how did you come to a different conclusion? Outside of society? The issue here (as I alluded to in my first post with the reference to a “late-capitalist self”), at least as I understand it from David’s post, is how to pursue the things one wants to pursue and make that pursuit self-sustaining (i.e. producing some reasonable profit, if not what one would call wealth). Saying “be yourself” is all well and good, but it seems to me that there’s more to this question than a choice between cliches.
Ray Wenderlich said,
December 2, 2009 @ 8:31 am
Interesting post. I’m getting ready to start my own blog, but I’ve been struggling lately with what everyone seems to say on the web: you need to find a limited focus for your blog to get the best results. However, that is difficult to me because I know what I am focusing on now (iPhone programming btw) but I can’t say whether that will still be my focus in 2 years, and having a successful blog is a long term endeavor. From your article it sounds like you are advocating to just post about your interests, and perform analytics on what your readers find the most interesting, or perhaps a greater theme will emerge naturally…?
kadavy said,
December 2, 2009 @ 10:05 am
Whoa, play nice, Brent! If I didn’t know you personally, I would think you were a real dick.
Yes, “be yourself,” as long as “yourself” is creative, enterprising, and self-motivated – mixed in with some particular interests.
That’s my response to the part of the discussion that my caveman brain was able to process.
kadavy said,
December 2, 2009 @ 10:11 am
Very insightful, Ray – that’s exactly what I’m saying! When I started my blog, there wasn’t any particular subject that I wanted to write about, and that benefited me. It’s amazing where little smash hit blog posts – whether it be that people share it a lot, or because it gets lots of Google hits – start emerge. If you read my first blog post you can see I really had no plan.
I’m no Robert Scoble or anything, but this blog has served me well. Some blog posts have spun off into other sites, some of them bring in some nice side income, some have landed me big clients. Along the way, I’ve learned web design skills, become a better writer (I never even considered myself a writer before), and come to generally understand media better.
Sean Corbett said,
February 14, 2010 @ 2:55 pm
Great post. “Be Yourself For a Living” A desire that probably millions of people share. I bet there’s some history to that line of thinking. When did people start desiring to BYFL? Which groups of people desire to BYFL today?
Back Office Exposed: Kadavy Inc. | Results Junkies said,
May 18, 2010 @ 4:02 pm
[...] Kadavy, Inc. is a Media company that I bootstrap with User Interface Design / User Experience consulting. The end goal is to be myself for a living. [...]
Levitra. said,
July 16, 2010 @ 6:47 am
Levitra….
Levitra….