Let me backtrack a bit. When I was growing up, people all around me always told me that so long as I could get a college degree, I would be good to go. So, when it came time to enter college and choose a major, I decided to major in history. (I bet you can see where this is going.)
Why did I choose history? Because it was my favorite subject! I had a great world history teacher in high school who turned a subject that for me until that point was incredibly dull into a fascinating topic. This inspired me to study history, with the long-term goal of becoming a professor in the field.
Well, shortly before I got my B.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin, I decided I didn’t want to go on to graduate school, but that I wanted to work. I was tired of studying, and after all, I already had my degree, so I was good to go, right?
As it turns out, some degrees are more practical than others. (You may roll your eyes now at my ignorance some 20 years ago.) I didn’t attend any job fairs, and I hardly made any effort to plan out my career until I was near the end of my final semester.
In that last semester, I considered several ideas for embarking on a career, but none of them panned out. I thought I could apply the knowledge gained from my university studies to a job in the CIA or the State Department, perhaps as an analyst. I was going to graduate in December 2001 and the War on Terror was ramping up, so I figured there might be opportunities in government, but both declined to hire me. I even thought about joining the military with the goal of becoming an intelligence officer, but fortunately the recruiting office was closed the day I decided to visit. What a near-miss!
Another option that came to mind was teaching history, so I applied to the Teach for America program, where participants can teach in underserved public schools while studying to receive their teaching licenses. (That’s right, I hadn’t even bothered to go for a teaching license as a backup plan while I was in college.) Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on your point of view, I was not accepted into the program.
At this time, I was completely dejected. I had no idea about what direction to take my life in. I was also pretty clueless on how to go about looking for a job. My two main sources for job information were the newspaper and Monster.com. I had no network to speak of.
Not so surprisingly, I ended up with a pretty crappy job. A few months after graduating, I took a position at a health insurance company as a “data entry specialist.” I was able to negotiate a higher wage because I can type really fast (100 words per minute). However, the job was hell. In fact, some coworkers from another department described my section as “the Hellhole.” For eight hours a day, I would type names, addresses, and other information from health insurance claim forms into a database. That’s it. I was allowed to listen to music on headphones, but that did not really help ease the utter agony of this mind-numbingly dull occupation. It also barely paid me enough money to get by. My work situation was sucking my will to live.
After a few months on the job, I took a trip with a friend to New York City, where we had a great time. I thought this would refresh me and I would be able to take on data entry with renewed vigor, but it actually made things worse. I was so utterly disappointed to be sitting in my cubicle when a couple days before I’d been on top of the Empire State Building.
To deal with this profound melancholy, I got into a very bad habit of drinking during my lunch breaks. Before heading out to work, I would take a 20-ounce bottle of Coke, pour out one-third of it, refill it with dirt-cheap whiskey, the kind you buy in a gallon jug, and drink it with my lunch. This gave me a pretty decent buzz that would fade enough by the end of the workday so that I could feel reasonably safe driving home.
Clearly, I was on my way to becoming an alcoholic. Things were not looking good. Then something incredible happened. One day, as I was working at my desk, I was called away by the manager. I was often late to work, early to punch out, and I called in sick with unusual frequency, but now I had done something that was the last straw: I had been busted using a desktop chat application while working. My manager pushed a resignation form across the desk.
I was all too happy to sign it! Finally, somebody had shoved me out of my sorry state. I gathered my belongings, was escorted out of the office, and drove home. There, I changed into a T-shirt and cutoff shorts, drove down to the lake — picking up a six-pack of tallboys on the way — and swam and sipped on beer and read a book and forgot all about all my worries. This, here, was the greatest turning point in my life.
After that day, I decided I would never, ever work a job I hate, even if it made me utterly destitute. As I began researching new work opportunities while performing a handful of odd jobs to cobble together some money, which included coaching fencing and working as a substitute teacher at local public schools, I took advantage of low interest rates and high credit limits to pay the bills I couldn’t cover with cash. Over a period of six months, I had racked up a credit card debt of around $18,000. This obviously was not sustainable, but I had to find a way to live happily, otherwise, what was the point of living?
One day, I saw a job ad for teaching English in South Korea. It sounded like a ridiculous idea to me at the time. I wasn’t going to move to some country I didn’t know anything about! But then a few weeks later, I saw the same ad again. I hadn’t hit upon any better ideas, and the more I reconsidered the prospect of working in another country, the more it sounded like an adventure than something out of left field.
That’s when I decided to research the possibilities for teaching English not only in Korea, but also in other countries. Specifically, I wanted to know where I could do this job while paying off my credit card debt as fast as possible. I compared several places, including South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and Thailand, but the one where it looked like I could save up money the fastest was Japan. This was also a nice coincidence because it seemed that Japan would be a really cool place to live! (It is.)
Within a month or so, I was hired by an English language school that sent me to Kyoto. At first I had only intended to work in Japan for a year and then use whatever marketable skills I could acquire there to find something back in the States, but then I met my future wife. I wanted to be with her, and it also turned out that I enjoyed teaching ESL much more than I’d expected, so I decided to stay for the foreseeable future. Eventually, I would learn Japanese and stumble upon some information about how lucrative being a freelance translator can be. The rest is history.
As I’ve said before, our long-term plans rarely come to fruition. Just a few years earlier, I’d wanted to be a history professor, remember? But that’s okay, because things can turn out great anyways. In my case, I can thank it all to being fired in my early 20s.
If you’re a freelancer like me, you’ve probably been asked the above question too many times to count. Of course, it’s an important one and you need to have a good answer. You also have to be sure of your answer, confident that you... Continue →