Day 8 - Buy when the market is down; Sell when it's up.

I woke up feeling excited about my work, or the prospect of the future job. It's been a while since I felt that get up and go buzz. I'd forgotten.

I was thinking of leaving the whole profession I work in and going back to university to retrain as a psychologist next year. I'm now starting to wonder if I've let my current job experience distort my perceptions for my career. I'm wondering if it's not what I do, but who I do it for that matters.

The fact remains that the work I do is stimulating, enjoyable and rewarding, and also that I have a natural talent for it: working with complex models, applying them in a business context, and clearly communicating and explaining the results to others. People and complex problems, not too different from psychology really.

Apart from the difficulties I have with my current employer, my normal pattern is a cycle between liking and not liking my job. Each phase usually lasts between two and four months. It's difficult to make clear decisions when my feelings about my job move so often. The trick is to work out on average what it's like, and then see if I can hack the down periods.

I think perhaps the psychology is something I should fit in on the side. There are more options than simply ditching my job and going back to university. Financially this would make more sense for me, and I also believe that I'm likely to get better at psychology as I get older. My purpose right now though is to bring my mathematical and communication skills to the world.