A Volatile Life

Last night, Adam and I were talking about some stuff that's going in my life, and he described my life as highly volatile. After my initial protest against such a term, another ten minutes or so of discussion had me admitting that, yes, he's right. While a little less volatility would be nice, I don't think I really want to change that.

By volatile, he meant that I tend towards activities that have greater risks, more change, but greater opportunity for reward, as well. It's kind of a, "Bet big, win big" point of view. I do try to mitigate risk and I've become much better at mitigating risk over time, but I'm also much less risk-averse than he is, or perhaps than most people are.

This discussion is a direct result of my recent and abrupt departure from Columbia Books. I can't really go into details here yet, as there are now lawyers involved, but that further illustrates the volatility point.

As an aside, I haven't posted much over the last several months because I've been very busy in my role of President and many of the things I was thinking about involved staff or other internal-only work that I could really discuss. In fact, I found that the work was about all I'd spent any significant time thinking about. Certainly the last ten days or so have had some elements of thinking about much wider subjects.

I'd taken a trip to Seattle with a side trip to Victoria, in Canada, just a couple of weeks ago. Partly because of the expense of travel for a lot of people and partly because I'm the only one that was interested in such a thing at the moment, I made this trip without Olympia and the kids. It seems I need to do that sometimes anyway because I need introspection time. It's very hard to introspect when you are in a house full of people.

As it stood, I didn't really get the usual amount of introspection time I might otherwise have had because I spent most of my time visiting with friends and family. That's also incredibly valuable, but different. What introspection I had time to do had revealed to me that I was actually working too hard and was ignoring too many other things I care about doing. I'd decided to change that when I came back, then a week later I wasn't working there anymore. Not quite what I had in mind, but I suppose it works.

What I'd had in mind was to do more hiking or other exercise, take up my guitar lessons again, get actively involved in Gregory's Cub Scouting, and spend some of the time I was spending in the evenings and on weekends working on Columbia Books stuff on some of the small projects that interest me, too, like developing a new edition of my WarEngine miniature gaming system. I'm starting to do those things, although there is a little short-term distraction as I figure out what form my future income will take. I've read a lot of articles by Steve Pavlina, and I think "a job" is out of the question. I may have to take employment with a company I don't own for shorter-term financial reasons, but if I do, there will have to be some form of profit-sharing involved, because a straight salary just doesn't cut it.

There's a lot to think about, but in a volatile life, there always is. I think that's one of the things I like about it.