“Once you’ve done what you have to, they’ll never let you do what you want to.” — Selina Kyle / The Dark Knight Rises

In a way, Catwoman was right.

I grew up fairly poor. Partially a result of my father’s untimely death and my widowed-mother’s financial situation. As a consequence our family struggled hard when I was young. Nothing unique about that, but what may make my story interesting is that I made poverty a boot-strap opportunity. As a geek growing up programming and building networks, it wasn’t long before I had a skill people wanted in the pre “dot-com boom” years of the late 90s. By the early 2000s I became a self-made man with little more than junior college under my belt. By the late 2000s I was a successful DFW InfoTech geek. I did what I had to do and what I was good at, and as a result I made bank. I was no longer obsessed with “not being poor”.

Yet each IT job I’ve worked undergoes the same pattern: they see I have knowledge of niche areas that bring value and, as they exploit my skills and add projects, my time gets more limited. This was especially true when I worked in IT departments where resources and talent were limited. As a PM, I’ve exploited the talents of any IT rock stars working for me. As a geek, I’ve found when you’re good they always find new things for you to do. Every day. Over and over again. And, in time, if you’re good you will be successful and earn a good living.

Of course there’s a price in any successful career, and the better you get that price is exacted in terms of free-time and obligation. IT is no different, and tech jobs can have times where they are more demanding than most. Sometimes you’re basically an ER doc with no sleep, tending to your binary patients during a rollout while your end-users sleep. Sometimes you’re an architect, building something that will make your users’ and IT team’s lives easier. Many times after a project or emergency, you’re tired. That’s when the next project or emergency inevitably starts.

Now that I’m pushing 40 as a Network Architect and being involved with family obligations, and eldercare daily (my mom is 82 years old and in fading health), I am trying to stop and smell some roses a bit more. Work-life balance in legal IT is hard. I want to play music, finish some songs, maybe do some writing. Just fun stuff. But that InfoTech job — — she’s a really jealous lady and leaves me pretty tired when it comes time to strum the guitar or do anything else that doesn’t involve work.

In many ways IT loves structure, cadence, and routine in a “left-brained” way that makes being creative much more difficult than it should be. You have to break through the monotony of logic and the mediocre to fire up those “right brain” thoughts. It’s a diffcult task for most IT geeks to do something else, but it’s critically important to have something other than some computer gig to make your life whole. One other saying from that earlier-quoted movie is apt for this conundrum: “Structures become shackles”. IT may pay decently, but if you aren’t careful is can also be a gilded cage.

So I think Catwoman did say it best in that quote from the Batman flick: there is “what I had to do” in order to grow and empower myself when I was younger….and now there is “what I want to do” and the IT career is this living, thriving thing that isn’t exactly thrilled about that.

Can I really strike a balance having this career, and still have time to create content or play my guitar…do the things I also want to do?

I think so. Stay tuned…

Originally published at julianwest.me on August 4, 2012.