Who Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up?

Today in Joe Corr’s class we were asked to pick 3 examples of people who have our dream jobs. I chose:

1. Chris Coyier – because he’s an expert (or at least considered by many to be an expert) but he’s also an innovator. Over the past 4 years I have been following his site and community as he created it. As Chris learned our community of avid standards based coders learned as well. I chose Chris because he’s managed to transcend a boundary between “really really good” at something and “innovator” or “leader in the field” status. Not that I necessarily want to work with CSS all day or design for that matter, but simply, I would like to become a leader in the field of my choosing, whatever that happens to be.
2. The guys/gals at Sparkfun. Again I don’t necessarily want to work with just hardware all day. I feel a variety of different technologies mixed with a little strategy would be a good fit for me…but these guys have it good. For one, they work at a small company (that also happens to be very financially stable). Second, some of these people get to play everyday! They come up with cool projects to either build or test and then do it! Who wouldn’t want to go to work everyday and get into something and not notice that they’ve passed by lunch and it’s already the end of the day?
3. Tim Ferriss. He experiements with what he calls “life design”. Basically he’s just really good at cutting out the bullshit. As a result, he’s amazingly successful at different activities and hobbies he takes on in a relatively short amounts of time. If I had his job, I would be spending most of my time (the other 36 hours/week) innovating in different areas of technology and social entrepreneurship. Specifically, I would help entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs make companies in developing countries. I happen to believe, despite popular belief, that the entrepreneur is the central driving engine in building stable economies and by association lifting the poor out of poverty.

Interesting exercise.