THE DAY JOB SURVIVAL (and Escape) KIT

Here's an excerpt from my upcoming book. Enjoy!

INTRODUCTION

Day-jobbers come in all shapes and sizes.

It doesn’t matter whether you serve cappuccinos in Dayton or trade on Wall Street. If you bundle your body off to work every day while your heart stays home to play guitar, write the great American novel, or design alternate planets, your job is a day job. And you are a creative day-jobber.

Creative day-jobbers live in two worlds that seem impossible to mesh. This book will help you bridge that daunting gap and turn your whole life into one amazing work of art.

You know these two worlds well.

In your job world, you push paper, wait tables, run a business, or take care of little ones. You’re competent, alert, conscientious and hopefully paid for your efforts. People look up to you or down at you, call you “Bob” or “Mr. Bob,” ignore you, or seek your advice.

Oh, but in the other world, you’re a poet, a painter, an actor! You dance and choreograph, make stage sets and direct. You write novels, record your own songs, perform for cheering crowds.

You’re bursting to live in this creative world, but it seems that you never can. Why? Because you give all your time and energy to the other one.

The tension from living in two worlds can be enormous. It’s possible to drive yourself completely around the bend. Instead, you resign yourself every morning and go to bed exhausted every night. You ask, “What’s the point?” and when there’s no answer, you give up and go to work. And there’s no end in sight.

The hardest part about this whole thing is that it hurts. It really does.

But what if you took all the difficulty and frustration of your day job and channeled that energy creatively, in the direction you want it to go?

This is where we can take a lesson from the martial art of aikido. Aikido teaches the defender to use the aggressor’s energy against himself. Instead of meeting a charging aggressor with matching force, the defender moves with the energy and lets the madman smash himself against a wall. Aikido transforms that undesirable energy into an action that works for the defender, not against him.

What would happen if, when your job threw its ugly energy in your direction, you met it with all your creativity and changed that raging raw material into something productive—possibly even beautiful and enjoyable?

The Day Job Survival (& Escape) Kit is about precisely that: applying your creative skill to transform an unbearable chore—and yourself—into a source of joy and inspiration.

Durga

October 2009