What do you hope to achieve? How do you plan to get there?

In my life, I have only really coveted three jobs:

• Rock ‘n’ roll superstar – I saw Elvis in GI Blues or Jailhouse Rock on the channel 9 Saturday afternoon movie when I was a little kid in the 70’s and thought, “That’s the life for me.”
• Center fielder for the New York Mets – Same as above, except instead of Elvis on channel 9, it was Tommie Agee.
• User interface designer – Sure, it’s a bit of a switch from the other two, but years of working in recording studios in the 80’s taught me exactly how important it was that products met people’s needs. Time is money, after all.

These days I do marketing and e-commerce and spend most of my time worrying about how customers experience brands online. So, I’ve achieved the last of these, in a fashion that satisfies me.

Jesse James Garrett, a sort of rock star user interface designer, and the author of the damned-fine “The Elements of User Experience” provided terrific life advice a few weeks back that you should check out. It may sound like “fake it ’til you make it.” But my experience tells me that you only achieve your dreams when you go after them.