"What do you want?"

One of my mentors kept asking me this question and it still sticks with me. Of course I'd been asked this question before, and in many different situations. In the context of that moment, I had been searching for the answer of what I want to do [professionally], which is a subtly different question.

What I want to do depends, ultimately, on what I want.

Suddenly, I had another question to answer. But at least thinking about how to answer this question can get me started on what I want the ultimate goals of my life to be.

Hashtag #goals

The benefit of getting older is that you get a longer view of the past - more hindsight. From this, I know that what I want is not static. It will never be static, right up until the day I die. But in this moment, and hopefully for many more moments in the future, I want to create some corpus of information that captures some of my evolving thoughts on engineering, philosophy, and maybe even some controversial stuff like how to properly pronounce "gif"\(^1\).

Wait, but why?

I feel like I'm in my late 20's, but I'm actually closer to my 40's. This scares the shit out of me. I feel like time is always running against me (because it is), so I want to start doing more of what I want and less of what I don't want.

One of those things is a need to create. My current job as a web developer gives me a lot of freedom for creativity, but there are a lot of constraints as well. There are still constraints in creative endeavors like writing (spelling and grammar) and music (staying in key, tempos, chord progressions), but in my current naïveté, there don't seem to be as many constraints.

Let's see how wrong or write I am.

\(^1\) By the way, it's pronounced /dʒɪf/ (with a soft g as in gem). Proof.