Music to My Ears and a Change of Heart

I mentioned a while back that I was working with Suzanne Smith of cellochan on getting her set up with a brand new website. After several months of work, everything is up and running and it looks great!

Suzanne is quite happy with the site we designed and has apparently already received a number of compliments. She's also quite happy that my initial foray into the world of search engine optimization has landed her on the first page of Google search results for a variety of search phrases which she's hoping will bring in some more business. If you are looking for "cello teachers in Ann Arbor", you should check out cellochan!

I had a good time working with Suzanne, but in the process, I discovered that designing websites, while interesting and challenging, really isn't the true calling of my heart. I admire anyone who has the skill to bring together the beautiful pictures, great typography, and focused layout necessary to make a great website. In the process of building the cellochan site, though, I discovered my passion is in building features, not making them look good.

I like the work I did on the design, but I love the extra tools I built. The page which displays excerpts from Suzanne's blog was fun because of the programming challenge it presented, not for how it looked. Setting up the means for Suzanne to update the quote in the upper right corner of the page was much more fun to me that trying to place the quote there in the first place. Building the tool which contacts Google Calendar to retrieve the event information was a heck of a lot more fulfilling than making sure the text was the right color.

That all being said, I now want to figure out how to reposition myself so that my business supports this passion for me. After all, if the work I'm doing isn't truly fulfilling me, then I might as well go work for someone else.

So, have you discovered your true passion of your job or business? What is it?