What is My Passion?

So after I wrote about Finding Your Passion, I thought I might write a little about my journey towards finding my passion.

Note, I have many passions, the greatest of which is learning new things.  This means that any job I take can be my passion, as long as it changes frequently enough to be challenging and educational.

I love finance.  I think the whole industry is fascinating.  I have always been involved in investments firms on the buy side, but I find everything fascinating.  Equity, fixed income, derivatives, pricing, valuation, research, automated trading, risk modeling, economics... The field is huge and vastly entertaining.

I am lucky enough to currently hold a position in a financial services company, developing software, improving processes, helping the business find technology solutions, helping integrate and update vended software, managing projects, leading teams, educating and inspiring co-workers, and asking good questions.  I like what I do, and I love my colleagues.  I could easily do it forever.

So what in the world would ever make me want to leave?  I have been thinking about what kind of things I want to accomplish, so here are some things that really excite me.

I love educating people.  Not just when I was a teaching assistant in grad school, but in every organization I have been in.  I've always pushed new ideas and relentlessly developed myself and others, but in my current organization, I started a program three years ago for my technology team to meet weekly to discuss libraries, patterns, trends in tech.  I present frequently, but almost everyone that attends gives a talk or two.  We are creating new speakers, and good community collaborators.

Recently this has come through most importantly in my volunteer work with That Conference.  I write content for a lot of communications.  I'm responsible for the emails to attendees, to speakers, to sponsors, a great deal of the printed program, and the welcome letter.  In a very real way, I am privileged to be a large part of the public voice of That Conference.

And I love it.  You know that Community Conferences changed my life, and I'm hoping that my involvement in That Conference will change the lives of other people.

Technology that saves people's lives, or saves them time, or makes them happy also is really intriguing to me.  Possibly nowhere else is this present in the idea behind the self-driving car.  I've blogged about the benefits of that in the past, but the short answer is that self-driving cars will save lives, save relationships, and save valuable natural resources.  I'm dying to make this a reality, and if there was ever a chance for me to help out, I'd be very interested in contributing. Legal, political, software, being involved in town halls, anything.  Let me help.

Something that leverages my love of data would be awesome, too.  Recently I did a little statistical analysis of the game of cards called War.  I did this because I wanted to learn to use the statistical language R, and I was honored to be able to speak about my experience at the Lake County .NET User Group.  Math, statistics, and data are awesome.

I'm not just a content generator, either.  I love to edit, to polish, to finish, and to critique.  I've done a whole bunch of technical editing for Pearson, Addison-Wesley, and Prentice Hall over the years.  I am quite proud to have worked on most of the books in Thomas Erl's series and to have praise quotes on a great number of his works.

Last, I guess I must like writing, too.  I do the occasional bit of blogging here, and would definitely be open to collaborating on a book, if I were able to find the right project, with the right collaborators.

Your turn.  Hopefully I've managed to stir in you some feelings about what you're interested in.  What's your passion?