Friday, March 16, 2012

Why are you in this business?

Since my last entry in November I've been crazy busy, which is good. I did another presentation at TechCon, still focusing on social media, but this time the topic was your general online presence. I believe it went well. Got a few good gigs coming, but here's what I'm thinking about:

Why did you decide to go into this business?

And when I say “this business” I mean whatever business YOU are in, but here I'm focused on the general machine steno profession.

Are you in this business because you want to make money? Are you in this business because you heard it had flexible hours? Are you in this business because you heard that training only took two years to complete and you'd be making six figures? Are you in this business because you heard you'd work with amazing people and hear interesting stories?

Why are you in this business?

Do you love the English language? Do you love converting it to text in the most efficient, accurate way possible? Do you love the record? Do you love knowing that the transcript is an excellent product that accurately represents the proceedings? Do you love hearing your Deaf consumer laugh as he reads your realtime feed of his coworkers BS'ing each other? Do you love knowing that there are dozens of Deaf/HOH persons in the audience who have complete access to the session because you have put in hours of practice and dictionary building?

Or are you just doing this for the paycheck?