There’s a lot of buzz these days around finding the sweet spot where opportunity, talent, and passion intersect. It’s the mystical crossroads where you can actually get paid to do something you love.

It’s like this magical, elusive crevice in your life’s road map where, if only you could figure out how to find it, your dream job would just appear.

You might spend years working in jobs you hate, performing tasks that eat you up inside. With bosses you fantasize about spontaneously combusting. Coworkers you want to punch in the nose.

And maybe, after some serious soul-searching, you realize, Hey, I’ve had enough of this, and it’s high time I find a new gig.

Following current logic, then, if you can figure out what really lights your passion (fixing up old motor homes, zentangle, homeopathic pet remedies?), all you need to do is get really, really good at it, and then happen upon the right person at the right time at the right place who’ll hire you do to do that thing you’re passionate about. Right?

Wendy Spies at Great Bridge Group created a great slide show prompting us to ask ourselves hard questions as we try to harness our passions and turn them into opportunities so that we can find that intersecting sweet spot which will land us the dream job.

The Harvard Business Review has a great article on the crucial role passion plays in worker productivity.

And you can read travel blogger Sabrina’s post at justonewayticket.com, where she reveals her secret to finding her ultimate gig. “I loved traveling to the point of madness,” she writes, “and I was able to channel that into a job.”

So, maybe you’re madly passionate about scrapbooking. And maybe you go to a scrapbooking event one Saturday afternoon at the local Marriott Hotel, and you chat up the lady running the show. She takes a liking to you, and suddenly you’ve been invited to work a trade show booth for her at an upcoming craft convention.

You did it! You’ve stumbled into a golden opportunity to do something you love, professionally!

But the big day comes, and you come to find out that standing around at a trade show booth is A) a volunteer gig, and B) kind of sucky.

To top it off, you bring your favorite scrapbook – say, the one you put together of your family’s summer vacation last year in Deep Creek, MD. You show it off proudly to some other scrapbook fanatics you meet there, and then they show you some of their best stuff.

And as you’re reviewing their beautifully adorned pages, suddenly it hits you like a wrecking ball to the gut: your scrapping skills are pretty lame. You just don’t have the talent for it.

But you tried. You took your passion and jumped on a great opportunity. It just turned out to be…not that awesome. You learned a tough lesson. Now what?

To help sort through this, I’ve decided to get some answers to the looming question: 

How do people find their career sweet spot?

It’ll be the new framework for my Conversations With… interview series going forward, and I’m very excited about it.

I’ll find out whether opportunity+passion+talent really is the secret recipe to career success. Because I’m not fully convinced that it is. I like to think of it as one part luck, one part clever, and one part crazy. With a whole lot of hard work thrown in.

Because some people really do just happen to be in the right place at the right time. 

And other people know how to work that angle to their advantage. 

And then there are still others who are just wild risk-takers, brave enough to jump off a cliff and see if they land with no broken bones. 

But the theme I see repeated over and over again is hard work, hard work, hard work.

So I’ll be chatting with some VIPs (Very Incredible People) who will share with us how they found, or are trying to find, their sweet spot to get them that dream job.

And I’ll ask them for advice on how you can go about finding it for yourselves.

I'll be sending out a BIG announcement coming very soon to reveal the next VIP interviewee!

Sign up for my RSS Feed at the right or follow me on Twitter to get notified when the latest Conversations With… interview is published! 

Thanks, as always, for reading!

 

Tomorrow will be my last day as a court reporter.

To cap off my career at the Allegheny County Courthouse, I am praying for some real firecracker theatrics.

I want the prosecutor and defense attorney to light the courtroom up with some fist-thumping, melodramatic closing arguments. Like in "A Few Good Men." 

I hope a juror takes a stroke and that paramedics are called.

If the defendant could break down sobbing in a heaving fit of tears to confess to the crime, that'd make my last day perfect.

And it'd be great if the judge had a mistress who could barge into the courtroom just before the verdict is announced to proclaim her fatal attraction to him.

But my fictional courthouse fantasy is just that, because what happens in real court -- you seriously can't make that stuff up.

It's been seven years of crazy.

Since I started this job, I've gotten married, had two kids, developed stress-induced seizures and carpal tunnel, and a bunch of my hairs have turned gray.

So I say goodbye to that life, because I can't live in that space anymore. 

Call me an optimist.  

But I'm escaping to a bubble where I can cup my ears and scream over-top of everyone else, proclaiming that YES, PEOPLE ARE GOOD! 

Because if I don't believe in that, then I'm nothing.

So, a fond farewell to all you comrades who are made of tougher, sturdier stuff than I. 

You do the good work I can no longer do. You have my utmost respect and admiration. 

I'll miss you, and eventually, I'll miss the crazy.  

Thanks for the stories and the memories. Hopefully we'll see each other again. Off the record.

At 6:30 a.m. and with the assistance of only one cup of coffee, I wouldn't characterize myself as terribly "on," intellectually speaking. 

But it's at this point on typically hectic mornings that my 3-year-old has begun asking me to tell her stories.  Not from books, but from my head.

"Talk to me about Rainey, Mama," she suggests between slurps of her milk and cereal, "and her cat!"

Rainey is a character I made up a hundred years ago, it feels like, on some traumatically drowsy night when my daughter wouldn't fall asleep on her own. 

As far as I could recall this morning, when my child asked me to retell the tale, Rainey and her family moved to a new neighborhood and now live in a big old house.  Rainey takes walks by herself and discovers an eerie, abandoned shack down the street where a family of talking squirrels hang out.  Nothing terribly compelling there.

That's about all I could remember today.  There was no cat.

But as any aspiring supermom would do, I stepped up to the plate to weave a tale of magical mishaps, right there on the spot as I sipped coffee #2. 

Over the next two and a half minutes, my 3-year-old and my 21-month-old sat enraptured by the tale of Rainey's overfed cat, Juicebox. 

The fat Tabby, poking around the house curiously while the family is away for the day, discovers a secret tunnel in the basement that leads to a magical party room, complete with blinky lights, a trampoline, swings hanging from the ceiling for kids to play on, waterslides, and mounds of candy just waiting to be devoured.

Not bad for off-the-cuff.  At least my kids thought it was pretty amazing -- especially when embellished by goofy voices and sound effects. 

Tomorrow's breakfast story time will reveal how the made-up kids (Rainey and, of course, her little brother, Stormy) will get to visit the party room with Juicebox.  And who knows what'll happen?!

Thank you, dear daughter, for the morning flash fiction writing workout!

If I could find a way to type while I'm in the shower, I could conquer the world.

I don't know if it's because I'm freshly abuzz after my first morning coffee or if it's from the hot steam that loosens up my joints, but there's something magical that happens for me in the shower, of all places, that generates BIG IDEAS to come bursting out of my creative cortex.

And if I don't leap out, dry myself off, and immediately lunge for the pen and notepad, those incredible plans seem to fizzle into a puddle of lost, forgotten dreams.

My left brain kicks in and takes charge as I get myself dressed and tend to the morning chores -- changing baby diapers, answering my 3-year-old's "Mama, why..." questions relentlessly, swapping work schedules with my husband, and scraping up flacid, milk-soaked Rice Krispies off the kitchen floor.

You'll never be able to pull that off, chides my more-practical psyche.

Come to think of it, that's a pretty unrealistic idea, it warns.

Better come up with a Plan B, it says.

Oh, how many life-changing ideas could have changed the world for the better -- but didn't!

Now's the time to change all that.

It's high time I start taking those shower stall flashes of genius and make something real out of them.  I'm publicly announcing -- proclaiming! -- that from now on, I will take serious steps to at least document those *unrealistic* dreams so that I can give them a place to live and, perhaps down the road, give them the chance to take shape into something *real*.  

Where and when do you have your most igniting flashes of genius and inspiration?  I'd love to hear how you lasso them to keep them alive!