Towards the goal of helping you think like a successful editor, we feature stories from different editors about their career paths. Knowing the paths that other people have taken is part of figuring out how one’s own path compares… and figuring out if we’re heading in the right direction. Which may or may not have anything to do with other people’s stories at all – your story is your choice. Here’s part of Jeff’s.
I was in high school in a tiny Midwest town, the only kid I knew who was actually into video and film. I produced a video that won some regional awards, which afforded me semi-celebrity status in the eyes of the local newspaper. Either that or they had some extra space left over from an unusually slow day in the obituary column. (No, I’m not kidding. Deadly serious, that’s me.) The reporter asked me about my future aspirations: “So Jeff, do you see yourself ending up in Hollywood?” Frankly, I had never considered it and wasn’t all that interested at the time, so I said no. Fast forward a decade and where do I end up? Go figure.
Fact is, when I graduated from high school, I had so many different things I was into… I produced, shot, and edited all my video projects; played piano, French horn, and the occasional Sousaphone for marching band; taught piano lessons, did some radio announcing, spent hours recording music with my MIDI studio, read voraciously, and still played with Legos (the really cool kind with gears and levers and electric motors). 
Didn’t have many friends, but then again I was too busy to really worry about it. So when I thought about “what I wanted to be when I grew up” and thought I had to choose just one thing, my brain started spinning in circles. Should I specialize in one thing, or be the jack of all trades, master of none? I had no idea.
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