Ready, aim …

You’re in a low-paying job, have few prospects and know there’s more to you than that job. You want a profession, a career. You want to be recognized. You want to be somebody.

What do you do? You might become an expert. An expert in what you ask. It doesn’t matter. Pick any subject, any area, any activity. Any one single thing. What you pick doesn’t necessarily have to interest you now in a great way. In time, interest will grow. You will be absorbed by what ever it is. Yes, you will.

Maybe you have something from childhood that always fascinated you, like for example, making and shooting spit balls. Then that should be your subject: spit balls. You need to Google, you need to ask reference librarians. You need to read, read, read. Once you find something written on spit balls, look for their sources and any references cited. Go to them, read them too. Absorb it all without making notes.

You might want to seek out students in other countries, not necessarily pen pals, but someone who can tell you how they make spit balls. Paper and spit. You may be surprised that it’s not all that simple. What if with chewing tobacco? You need to mine for information on spit balls everywhere. You might run an advert in several teachers’ journals. “Doing research on classroom spit balls. Can you help. e-mail….”

Then you might investigate and actually experiment with spit balls. Set up a bull’s-eye target. Study the trajectory. Use your straw. Under-, over-, side-lipped… Try paper straws, plastic straws. Try cutting a straw in half.

In a few years you will become the world’s expert on spit balls. You might then attempt to write your first article on spit balls. First find a place that will post or publish your small article, then write it to slant that outlet. It does not matter if you don’t receive any money for what you write. You are not after money, your compensation will be more cognition in your field. The field of spit ball and being the only expert in that area. You yourself will become a spit ball when you retire for the night and dream of what? Spit balls, of course.

Where does this lead? I don’t know. I picked, spit balls, by random. It could have been, hiccups, or something more common. Something uncommon. Something rare, but not necessary so. Whatever it is, you will be throwing your life into it. And that’s how you become an expert. An authority.

Again, where does this lead? Maybe nowhere. But maybe you’ll get a grant to study spit balls further with the aim of, heaven’s knows, designing a spit ball space station or an … Organizing a National Spit ball Competition. You can daydream, but you shouldn’t. What comes to you via spit balls as a result of your study of spit balls will come in its own natural way.

If you can’t think of one sole thing that grabs your attention, then open a dictionary at random and stab your finger down there, that’s it!

Don’t laugh; isn’t this how life in the free world works? Life’s fate comes along and decides a job, a profession, a career, a lover, home state, an automobile, on and on, for you. By becoming an expert in some thing, any thing that you pick you are the master of your own fate. You picked it. But if life’s fate picks something that will become like a fetish for you, then go with it.

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