The Big Thing
/In order to succeed against fierce competition, one needs to be single minded about what they are doing.
“...the commanding general’s mind can be seized. For this reason, in the morning their ch’i is ardent; during the day their ch’i becomes indolent; at dusk, their ch’i is redolent.”
Sun Tzu says you need to be ardent - very enthusiastic or passionate - when starting out. The Big Thing is reflected in a lot of the smaller stuff that I'm working on, in this blog, and everything I am doing right now. You could say I'm ardently pursuing it.
The big thing is launching a journalism career.
It's a tumultuous time for the industry. Everyone from CEOs to students are scratching their heads trying to figure out where it's headed. Nobody has figured out the future of journalism - if anyone has, they would be billionaires - but that doesn't change the primary goals of journalists. We tell stories to inform the public and make voices heard.
To put things optimistically, more people than ever before are reading the news. More countries have access to independent journalism than ever before. But according to Reuters only 13% of Australians are willing to pay for online news, the only place where media consumption is steadily growing. Where does that leave an industry starved of revenue?
Like everyone else, I have no idea where this industry is headed. We see steep cost cutting, job losses and redundancies at every major news organisation. Despite all this, the need for people to tell the public what's going on will never disappear, society will always need people informing them. They need people to expose corruption and everything else that journalists do.
Oh, and it sure beats any other office job. Why sit in front of a computer staring at spreadsheets when you can get a job driving around asking important people dumb questions?
January 2017, about to ask Richard Di Natale some dumb questions