Ambition, Complacency, Contentment
On passion, problems, and the choices we can make
As a minor, life is very structured. You are mandated to attend school. Each year, you advance one grade level. You live wherever your parent(s) or guardian(s) do. If they move, so do you.
This changes when you become an adult. Suddenly, life becomes a choose-your-own-adventure book. There are surprisingly few concrete rules.
I remember, as a young adult, meeting people who had moved to my city on a whim, and being absolutely shocked — I hadn’t fully realized that was something you could actually do.
After I graduated from high school, I spent four years getting my Bachelor’s degree. I then spent another year getting my Master’s degree. My first job post-graduation was a contract position with a very clear end date.
Each step in my journey felt like exactly that — a concrete step. I’ve always known where I was and how long I would be there.
Now, for the first time, that’s no longer true.
My current job, which I’ve been at for slightly over a year, is a full-time, salaried position. There is no end date. I’m not a sixth grader who will eventually be a seventh grader or a college freshman who will become a sophomore.
As I approached the one-year mark, it hit me — this job is only temporary if I decide that it is. Similarly, if there’s anything I want to change in my life, I have to be the one to change it.
Once you’ve been at a company for a bit, it can become easy to see how some people spend decades working the same job. There are always new goals, new challenges, and new situations to adapt to. You often find yourself putting in tremendous effort to achieve incremental progress.
Things take time. Unfortunately, I’ve never been particularly fond of waiting.
Luckily, I think I’m in a strong position as far as having fairly good job security for the media industry, being able to impact our coverage, and having the potential to grow something alongside a group of talented people.
I also see potential opportunities moving forward to gain additional experience and more visible reps creating types of content that I would like to do in a more professional setting, such as the stats-based storytelling and bracketology that I’ve been doing on a personal level for years already.
However, I’ve also seen many of the downsides of the industry, including turnover, burnout, people (correctly) feeling undervalued, and bureaucratic management that makes positive change on a reasonable timetable seem like a pipe dream.
It too often feels like, through the fault of no one I work with directly, that for every step we take forward, we then take two steps back. That can be immensely discouraging when you’re part of a team that really does want to be great.
Professional life is a marriage between what you can provide to an organization and what that organization and environment can provide to you. At some point, if I lose confidence in the organization’s ability to hold up its side of the deal, I would have to consider other options.
I’m very conscious of wanting to avoid staying in the same place for long periods of time without seeing significant change. On a personal level, I also don’t want to lose my creative fire and ambition.
My ultimate goals have remained consistent over the last several years. I want to create things I’m passionate about and find value in as freely as possible. That’s a vague statement, and it’s done with intention.
I want to write books, articles, short stories, and essays. I want to create fiction and non-fiction about sports and non-sports topics. I want to make videos and podcasts if they best suit the idea. I want to work on video games. I’m inspired by poetry and music, even if I can’t play an instrument.
I want to see where the journey takes me, and I want it to keep me guessing. Even if there are things I do consistently across my lifetime, I always want to challenge myself by bringing new things into the fold. I want to be varied and unpredictable, and I want to surprise people.
At some point, I do want to either go independent or be part of a company or collective where I can focus a much higher percentage of my work on these projects.
It already feels like I have more ideas than I can possibly get to, and that’s required an adjustment to my mindset. Recently, I’ve learned to be OK with not writing quite as much.
My writing goals for 2023 were to only work on things I really wanted to write, let the motivation come to me, and enjoy the process rather than speed things up just trying to finish. I’m proud of how I’ve tackled that.
It’s also important to realize the balance between creating things and living life in order to create the experiences that will feed into your creativity. Those two things are in constant interplay, and I think I’ve spent much more time in 2023 in the “gathering” phase, where 2022, for example, was a big “producing” phase.
On a more tangible level, I’m beginning to work on the next Asher Raines story, which should be released sometime before the end of the year. These are always some of the most challenging things to write but also the most rewarding. Because of how important they are to me, I always want to spend as much time as necessary to give each story the execution it deserves.
I’m not currently writing a new book, although I have a good idea of what the next book will be. Judging by my own patterns, my best estimate would be that I start working on it next summer and that it comes out in late 2025–2026. But who knows!
In the shorter-term future, I see myself doing a lot more short story and essay writing, with the possibility of these turning into a short story collection or YouTube channel, respectively.
These are things I’ve wanted to do for a while but haven’t found the time for. Over the past several months I released a batch of standalone sports storytelling pieces that I had wanted to hit, and now feels like a good time to take a break from the genre.
I’ve been saying for years that I’ve wanted to do more non-sports work, but there have always been sports projects I’ve chosen to do instead. I think structuring my sportswriting definitely comes a bit easier to me (I’m a professional sports researcher, after all), whereas everything else takes more time to figure out precisely how to order and phrase my ideas.
Obviously, since writing about sports is closely aligned with my current career, it has generally ended up taking priority as it feels more likely to help me with my career. Anyone can try to write a short story — I’m actually a professional in the sports industry.
To a certain extent, that is relieving, though. Now that I’m an established member of the industry, I don’t need anyone’s permission to make the content I want to make — I can just do it.
I spent many years trying to develop my creative skills and form a body of work to get into this competitive industry, and that goal has been achieved.
Knowing that I have achieved that goal does force me to reevaluate some of my professional concerns, however.
I don’t want to feel like I’m staying in the same place, but I also don’t really know where I’m trying to go, since any plans of working on my own projects full-time still seem impossibly far down the line.
On the one hand, I see considerable problems that are beyond my scope in being able to solve. I’m also gaining additional responsibilities but finding myself frustrated by not being able to make as many improvements as I’d like in those areas.
Yet, on the other hand, if I zoom all the way out and look at where I am right now, I feel much better than I have been for much of my adult life, and a large portion of that comes from the community I have.
I think what I’m realizing right now is that there will always be problems, and, knowing that, it’s important to have scope and to have gratitude.
To a certain extent, we can choose what we allow to bother us, and we can choose to be happy. This is not easy, and it doesn’t mean that we ignore our problems.
However, I do think that there is power in understanding your current situation, evaluating what is in your control, and focusing on the good around you and the things you can change.
If, after these actions, we decide that the best course of action is to make a major shift such as changing where we live or work, then that’s what makes sense. I always want to encourage people to make the best decisions for themselves and take good opportunities, even if it means our paths diverge.
Personally, I’m hesitant to stay in the same place for too long, but what I should be asking myself is, “If I do stay in the same place, is that complacency or simply contentment?”
Complacency is reluctance in the face of growth and progress. That’s a problem. Contentment is peace of mind. That’s not a problem — in fact, you could argue it’s the ultimate strength.
