Do the Next Thing

I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list. – Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”

Unless you absolutely, positively know what you’re meant to do at the age of five, you’ll find yourself on a meandering course. You may have a general sense of direction, but you probably won’t be sure of the way to get to your final destination. You’ll think about things like internships and entry-level positions, some of which will get you closer to where you’re trying to get and some of which will lead to dead-ends and course corrections.

You don’t give up when those things happen; you learn what you can from the dead-ends and course corrections and move onto the next thing on your list. You learn not to spend so much time in the future that you can’t find your way in the present. You stay in the real world. You focus on the next thing and the next. You give concrete form to your ideas and goals. You take the internship. You work the grunt jobs. You take a photography class or a drawing class or a writing class. You do what it takes. You work and work and work,

and,

one day,

you’ll find you’ve arrived at your destination, but it’s not quite the place you imagined. You now have a new destination in mind. You’ve done the next thing and the next, and you’re ready for more, so you get ready to set off again. You write your list, and you do the next thing.

Image: Crystal (CC BY 2.0)