It’s 4pm, the tea is brewed, the snack is plated, and I’m ready to watch one of America’s top rated daytime TV talk shows. Today’s topic is: “Actors take on their dream jobs…” Actors?  Dream Jobs? Gee, for me, being employed as an actor would be a dream job and I certainly wouldn’t dream of working at a real job! (Right out of high school, my aspiration was always to act and star in a play or movie that I had written.) But, is the thought of being a Hollywood superstar merely a dream for the unemployed? Statistically speaking, the fastest growing industries are now in the fields of engineering, health care and tech jobs, to name a few.  Acting is not listed in the top ten of career hotspots.

The electronic semiconductor distribution industry brought me to the Silicon Valley in the early nineties. Then, working as an Inside Sales Representative, I watched eager coworkers carve pathways towards specific employers with the idea being that you use one good company as a platform to qualify you for the next great one. Cliques of successful, company-hopping, account executives were most popular back then; they were my peers and adversaries at the same time. My coworker and I used to regularly attend the standard after-work cocktail gatherings, aka “forced fun”, where we were obliged to see and be seen largely because this form of social networking could lead to big-time jobs. And so it happened one evening while dining, socializing and dropping my business card in the fishbowl at the bar, that I learned of where the next door could possibly open for me. Although I knew that this was not my true career goal, what could I personally do with this opportunity?   I landed a job at a leading network technology company in Silicon Valley; they issued me a plastic badge for computerized access to the secured floor where I worked, and it was there, amidst rows and rows of cubicles with eight foot high walls where I quickly figured out exactly what to do. Somewhere between work and assimilation with corporate culture, I found time to pen my first award winning short story! So, in the end, I aligned two completely separate career paths into one straight path towards my ultimate career goal.  By the way, I missed that TV episode doing research for this blog…guess I’ll catch it on the rerun!