What Am I Doing With My Life?!

When I realized that I didn’t have any idea what I liked to do for fun anymore or what my passion was, I did some digging. Mostly, I looked back at the reading I had done over the past year and categorized it internally. What I found was somewhat surprising and helped figure some of the characteristics of a job that I would want to do.

One of the first things that I found was that the bulk of my reading has changed over the past 3 years. The key change has come from RSS feeds and Google reader. Once I happen upon something interesting or a site that I think will provide interesting and thought provoking articles I add it to my reader. This also means is that I get information overload from the shear volume of articles coming my way. With so many interesting articles being aggregated it is easy to get caught up in them and forget about books.

What is handy about Google Reader is that it has trends. From this I can see the top publishing blogs that I subscribe to and I can also see the percentages of what I read in each blog. For instance, Huffington Post now releases over 218 articles on average each day. While I used to read them like it was my job, I now average 0% of their articles read, or in actual numbers I read 18 posts in 30 days from them. Clearly, I’m not that interested in politics any more. Conversely, I’ve read over 150 articles from Destructoid, a video game site (yeah, I’m a huge nerd). In fact, some of the highest percentages of sites that I read are tech sites and other things that make geeks happy.  Mixed with these are some of my favorite sites that I’ve mentioned before, a whole bunch of the personal finance blogs, and a wide range of others.

My interests are actually all over the place. There’s no one thing that sticks out, but there are definite trends. I still love gadgets and video games, I really enjoy reading about how to optimize my finances, several blogs about entrepreneurship, lifestyle design holds a lot of interest, and politics have fallen off the radar almost entirely, when I used to read about it religiously.

So, what I learned from this is that I want a job that lets me play around with social media and uses technology to reach out to people in different ways. I’ve been interested in marketing and putting that into action. I gravitate towards inspirational bloggers, people who have broken the mold that society has created and done their own thing. Basically, it boils down to wanting to start my own business and playing with the different tools that are accessible to me. That, and that I like to learn and never want to stop.

So how about you? What does your feed reader say about your interests? When you distill the themes and trends what do you end up with? Where do your interests lie?

Kerry Finding yourself