Later, I asked him, "So, Travis, how do you feel about your career?" He said, "Great. I think I'll be a millionaire someday." He was serious. This threw my little ego for a loop. Here I am, barley able to work five hours a day because it's so hard to do such dry work, and this guy, with no more smarts than me (less?!), is stoked to make a killing. What's wrong with me?

Well, not so very much, I've decided. What I wanted to talk to him about is the lack of heart in our work. The work we do for our clients is heartless and mostly commerce serving. The work we do to create the product is heartless too—sitting at the monitor for hours, managing code and resources, is heartless.

This morning I realize that I'm not such a loser as I thought last night.

Here's a quote from my reading this morning:

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you ... Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use. —Carlos Castenada, The Teaching of Don Juan —found in The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

This is not to say that sitting in front of a monitor all day is not heartless, only that maybe my gripe with it stems more from the reality that my body revolts against it than from some altruistic principle I hold that I shouldn't be in heartless work.