Finding purpose

Reflecting on 6 months of Ocras

This edition of Ocras is number 26. In other words, I’ve made it through the first half of my self-imposed goal of a year of weekly writing.

So buckle up, I’m going to get a little introspective in this edition. Please be assured that regular service without awkward emotions will resume next week.

Writing in long form is very enjoyable, but totally different to writing snappy social media captions or restaurant descriptions. Once the first draft is in place, I work my way through it, often deleting paragraphs or seeking more succinct words to impart my thoughts. My desire for precise and tight use of language was sharply honed during my physics days, and I always endeavour to use fewer well-chosen words over reams of text.

And now that I’ve spoken about how I do it, the more important question is why I do it.

My food writing started back in 2008 when I was living in Brussels, working as a data migration developer on a software implementation project. In the evenings, I would relax in a very comfortable IKEA chair in my apartment near the Palais Royale, and disconnect from my day job. The joy of flexing words and describing sensations was a world away from developing and debugging SQL code and Informatica logic. As my career developed in technology, blogging continued to be for my own pleasure, and I didn’t often consider who was actually reading my words.

Fast forward to the current day, where I recently attended a work training session called “Find your why”. Learning and development is always at the forefront of my employer’s agenda, and even though I’m a huge skeptic by nature, I really do often find benefit in attending the ‘softer skills’ sessions.

During the session, we paired up to share professional and personal stories where we had felt a true sense of achievement. And as we told each other our stories, something kind of wonderful happened. Magical might be too strong a word, but we both were amazed at how we could see common threads appearing across our personal and professional stories.

In my case, my stories could not have been more divergent in terms of subject matter (big technology implementation project vs writing food articles for the Irish Times) but two hours later, I found I that I had scribbled down a personal purpose statement.

TO… create good ‘stuff’

SO THAT… it matters to someone who uses it and brings them a real benefit

In a day job context, it means that I prefer to work on projects to deliver new systems and processes which really make a difference to how people work, or to the end-users. The biggest kick is seeing people using the new systems and actually hearing them say that it’s faster, better or easier to use than the previous version.

From a food writing perspective, I love stories of how a reader found a new favourite spot, or how a small business received new customers because of a piece I wrote. Until I starting writing for a national paper, I truly did not understand the impact a business could experience from being featured. All I’ll say is that print isn’t dead yet folks.

So please, don’t be a stranger. Let me know when something is useful to you. Leave a comment on this post, or message me. Tell me what works well, and what could be better. I’m so full of enthusiasm and passion for Irish food and drink that I sometimes don’t know what parts you want to hear about.