Achtung! Again!

This post led to this post, where I answered the first of these three questions:

1. What is the quality of experience I want to have as I earn a living?
2. What gifts do I want to give to life as I toil at challenging tasks that are interesting to me?
3. What capacities do I want to develop in myself while doing my work?

In this post, I’ll answer the second question.

What gifts do I want to give to life as I toil at challenging tasks that are interesting to me?

I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to give the world a Coke…

Okay, no, not really.

Seeing as my top priority for a job that I covered in the last post was creativity, it seems fairly obvious what I want to put out into life, the world, and the universe in general. I want to create.

I’m not a musician, and I’m not a physical artist—I don’t want to add sound to the world, or a painting or sculpture. As much as my father might want it, that’s just not what I want to do. I do love to write, and I love to be creative with concepts and ideas.

I’d like to give originality. I’d like to make someone stop and think—wether it’s about a product or about a concept. I’d like to make people react in pleasant surprise, laughing or smiling or even just glazing over as they’re startled into rethinking something.

I’d like to give stories. I love stories, I’ll read just about anything with a plot, and I would love to put more stories into the world. This ties into wanting people to think—the biggest story on my plate right now is about how one man deals with his Christian identity while in a relationship with another man, and a project that’s been on my mind for years is the story of a guy who falls in love with someone online, with no clue as to their gender. I’m not writing them as GLBT stories—they’re just stories about people. In one, the main characters happen to be bi or gay; in the other, while the main character does struggle with what it means for his orientation that he’s fallen for someone who he can’t identify as female, it’s more about his struggle than it is about the possibility of a same-sex relationship. If I do it right, I could really make people think about the messages behind my stories, and even see things from a new perspective.

And both of those things are interesting to me—taking old concepts and turning them on their heads; creating new concepts; developing characters and plots that people can identify with even as they’re scratching their head and saying “Huh, what would I do in that situation?”

There is another answer to the question, if looked at from a different perspective: I want to have kids, and have them also be my gift to life and the world. I want to raise them with good hearts and good values, so there are more good people in the world. Doing so will be interesting, challenging, and, from what I hear, the most fun and awesome experience in the universe. And it will also be work, which I think qualifies it for that question.

To sum up this whole thing: What do I want to give to life? The things I love in it. Originality, good stories, and good people. Easy.

Next question.