I Have a Particular Set of Skills (That Involve a Butcher's Knife)

“If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”

In case you’re unfamiliar with the above quote, it comes from the movie Taken, starring Liam Neeson as an absentee father who follows a grand character arch of the hero’s journey achieving redemption via murdering 35 destitute foreigners to save his daughter.

Or something like that.

I just love the quote. Everyone loves that quote.

It’s hilariously awesome in its premise, execution, and when you put it in the low grumblish Irishy voice of Mr. Neeson, it gets encapsulated in our brain tendrons for decades to come.

So here’s my edited version as applied to my own life as it exists today:

“I can tell you I don’t have money. I have skills; skills I have acquired that make me a nightmare for people.”

See what I did there? Took the exact words, strategically removed a few, and ended up with a new block of text with a more succinct message. I butchered it down to a different format.

45 words down to 22, not the biggest reduction, but you get the point. Hopefully, it gave you a mini chuckle to boot.

That’s Canadian slang—short for “No doot aboot it”—spelled in the traditional Queen’s English.

But why am I mentioning this?

Am I writing a passage to make you laugh? Am I about to sell you a service? Am I procrastinating from a great ongoing freelance job that literally pays the bills by writing something that’s far more enjoyable and freeflowish and wishy-washy-throw-my-random-thoughts-against-the-giant-universe-of-the-internet-that-is-your-inbox?

Yes. No. Yes.

It’s something I’ve been doing for half a year now. I’ve been butchering words to make them more digestible.

I take the complex. Read it. Re-read it. Re-read it 100 times.

And delete. Cut. Slash. Punch. Throw.

Then Mix. Mash. Switcharoo.

Finally, I grab a fancy picture to help paint the fancy picture that is the content I’m curating.

Save.

Then move on to the next one.

Rinse and repeat one batch a month and my rent is mostly paid for.

This is my nightmare. This is my dream.

This is something I should probably be doing every day of the week because it’s for a great cause, it’s interesting to learn, and it’s valuable to the audience it addresses.

But I hate doing it 95% of the time. Or, that is, 95% of the time my brain won’t let me do it.

I’ve been taking complex actionable academic writing and turning it into digestible articles purposed for the internet in order to help a client’s overall business goals.

I suppose I’m good at it after all this tinkering over recent years. I certainly get paid far more than you’d expect to do it, and my main client keeps coming back for more. I don’t think he’s read my humor.

I just wish I had the temperament and ability to actually turn every other part of my brain off and go to town on the vast backlog of work he’d (assumably) like me to help with.

But right now, I don’t.

I’m scatterbrained.

I’ve encapsulated myself in so many incredibly interesting ‘Want to do’ projects that I end up doing nothing on more days than I’m proud to admit.

Some of you are probably thinking, “That’s clearly anxiety,” other’s might be thinking, “That’s clearly ADHD,” other’s may even proffer, “That’s clearly an excuse of a lazy good-for-nothin’ millennial who doesn’t know what it’s like to climb upfrozenhill both ways on the path to school every morning while the fires of hell burned around you in a dystopian past that never really existed in the first place.”

Well, you’d probably be right in most cases. These things are on a spectrum, a scale.

Even a 0 or a 1 is on a scale, so we’re all somewhere on there.

I just felt like sharing how my brain works lately.

It seems to be on a stretch of overthinkingness which occasionally flares up every few years. The gym helps, I hit those weights harder than Tucker Carlson’s head as a child.

Beer helps. Smokes helps. Socializing helps.

But really, I think the underlying thing that would really help, and I’m bringing back the word really because Grammarly tells me not to use it in 100% of cases, is the utter freedom of solopreneurship.

We all hate having to work for companies, more or less.

Maybe not all the time, especially if you enjoy your job like some of us lucky few have experienced in the past. But I’ll still wager that generally, people don’t like having to wake up 500 days a year to go do something for 8-12 hours.

But there are pros and cons to everything in life. Everything in the world, pretty much. Cats scratch our corneas after we cuddle them. Puppies shit on your new Versacci $50,000 white pleather couch. Babies grow into Tucker Carlson.

The list goes on.

It’s Sometimes About the Cons.

For me, the cons of this form of entrepreneurship (being a “creator” on Web 3.0) are the endless options.

In the psychology world, it’s called “information overload.”

As Sir Wiki states:

“Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information.”

Lol just learned ‘infobesity’ for the first time. Hilarious.

In the business world, it’s known or extracted as decision paralysis, or analysis paralysis. I remember that one because it rhymes and I like rhymes. Disagree? Get with the times, advisee.

The great irony of this, and the conclusion you’ve probably been patiently waiting for, is that I probably excelled in some of my jobs in the past because of this way of thinking.

I was far from a perfect employee, but I tended to stand out. I tended to think of all the extreme situations that could possibly be thought up in my mindcasing and offer them up as things to be concerned about, as solutions, as options.

Whenever this solo-brainstorming came up with an idea that wasn’t yet thought of or discoursed, suddenly I looked like a particularly smart individual. A free thinker. A modern republican’s wet dream.

Even that had its limits—because the flipside of repeatedly offering unique ideas—is that just like coming up with jokes—most of them suck.

But when we practice things daily. Repeat them day in and day out a few times, dozens of times, hundreds of times, thousands, a lifetime of thinking style emerges and—usually—the practicer becomes better at it.

Me, the Practicee.

I’m really good at boiling down thousands of variables in complex problems into simple laid out options.

For other people.

Not for myself.

I lack the butcher’s knife for my own work.

“Kill your darlings,” they say, but I clearly have a preponderance to let them live, f*ck, breed, and multiply by the thousands. Forget the prolific writer who’s great at editing down their words into beautifully simplistic passages. I’d need a f*cking exterminator at this point.

It’s something I need to figure out how to improve at, and not just for my writing. There is a sense of calmness that comes from being organized. From having a plan to stick to. From taking the random and creating order.

And for whatever reason, I’ve been rumbling down disorder river lately. It’s fun to think about and ponder, but it sure does take an unseen toll over time.

The toll of uncertainty. I suppose the entire world is feeling a version of this more or less lately. From insurrections to pandemics to populism to climate havoc, the world is becoming an evermore uncertain place.

And that just sucks.

It also sucks that I can’t seem to put one of the basic building blocks of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into place either—and I feel that toll is adding up, in addition to the massive clusterf*ck of the world’s problems right now.

I don’t have a moral story to this random output of an article today.

I just felt like sharing what I’m going through and thought maybe some of you can relate.

I just know I can take a bit of solace in the one consistency of my inconsistency in life—that in time, this too shall pass.

At some point I’ll figure out what it is I need to set my sights on—and dive in.

Something that will both pay the bills and keep me enthralled for at least a few years. And when I finally arrive in that valley of addictive curiosity, I hope you’ll be here to share in its joy with me.

Thanks for reading my thoughts today.

Until next time, peeps.

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J.J. Pryor

Image Credit: Photo by Evgeni Lazarev from Pexels