At 38, I finally noticed that the thing I’d been searching for had been making noise in my head my entire life.
Yo! My name is Ian. I’m a husband, a father, a Marine Corps veteran, and a DevOps engineer working in the video game industry. Before that, my background included corporate automotive and a handful of other adventures. I’ve traveled, had some fascinating experiences, and met even more fascinating people.
Why am I telling you this—and why should you care?
Because through all of it, I’ve struggled with the same question a lot of people do:
What do I actually want to do?
The Question I Couldn’t Answer
When people ask, “What do you do?” the expected answer is usually a job title.
But I’ve always felt like that question should mean more. What excites you? What do you contribute? What feels uniquely yours?
It’s a deep and fascinating question. It seems like it should be easy to answer.
But—and I know I’m not alone here—it isn’t.
Nobody has quite the same answer, either. You can glance at your neighbor’s paper and copy a few responses, and that might work for a while. Eventually, though, you realize that following someone else’s footsteps just ain’t it.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy with my life, and I’m comfortable in my day job. I build software tools and infrastructure that support development teams. I like it, and it can be genuinely rewarding.
But the truth is, I’m not passionate about it.
So I’ve spent much of the last decade bouncing between ADHD-fueled hyperfixations and half-attempts at figuring myself out.
You wanna know what I discovered?
Lean in. I’ll tell you the secret:
Not. Much.
The Clue I Kept Overlooking
Stay with me.
You probably won’t find your direction by constantly watching other people and measuring yourself against them. There’s a good chance you’re looking too far outward when the useful clues are already part of your everyday life.
Cosmic mumbo-jumbo, I know.
But looking inward honestly is a skill—and it’s surprisingly hard.
Ironically, I’ve spent my entire life mimicking people. And sounds. And voices. And accents.
I’m constantly in my own head, creating characters, telling stories, and repeating things in voices that definitely don’t belong to me. Sometimes one escapes into the outside world. When that happens, I usually get a surprised—or occasionally annoyed—look followed by:
“Whoa. That’s really good. How do you do that?”
I never thought much about it.
That was the problem.
It had been right in front of me—and inside my head—forever.
The things that come naturally to us can be the hardest things to recognize as skills. They don’t feel remarkable because they’re simply part of how we move through the world.
For me, that thing was voices.
So I started researching voice acting and discovered that there’s an entire craft, business, and industry built around something I had already been doing for fun my entire life.
You’re telling me I can train this weird little lifelong habit, build a home voice-over studio, and potentially get paid to tell stories and play with voices?
Yeah, dude.
Passion Still Takes Work
People love to say, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
I don’t completely buy that.
Voice-over is work. Learning to perform is work. Building a studio, editing audio, auditioning, marketing yourself, managing clients, and handling the business side are all work.
But there’s a difference between work that drains you and work you’re willing to struggle for.
Maybe that’s the real clue.
I’ve had other answers over the years. For a long time, I thought writing was my passion. I’m a pretty good writer, and there was a time when it brought me a lot of joy. Eventually, though, I stopped doing it. I’ve revisited it repeatedly over the last 30 or so years and tried to force that feeling to return, but it never came back in quite the same way.
Maybe writing was right for one season of my life. Maybe it will be right again someday.
Finding your direction isn’t necessarily one enormous revelation that answers everything forever. Sometimes it takes experiments, wrong turns, and several different versions of yourself before something finally clicks.
Those wrong paths can be discouraging, but they aren’t wasted. Every one of them teaches you something about what fits—and what doesn’t.
What Might You Be Overlooking?
I know this post has been mostly about my own journey, and I’ve used enough metaphors that you may currently be drowning in them.
So here’s the point:
If you’re struggling to find something you genuinely care about, it may not be as far away as you think.
Take a step back and try to look at yourself from an outsider’s perspective.
What do you do when nobody asks you to do it?
What do other people notice in you?
What kind of difficult work are you willing to keep returning to?
The answer may be hiding inside a habit, an impulse, or some strange little part of yourself that you’ve never taken seriously because it comes naturally.
Mine was voices.
What’s something you’ve always done naturally but never considered a real skill?
Follow My Voice-Over Journey
This is the beginning of a series documenting my journey into voice acting from the ground up. I’ll be sharing honest updates about building a home voice-over studio, improving my performance, finding auditions, marketing myself, handling the business side, and learning from the mistakes I inevitably make along the way.
No overnight-success nonsense (unless…?). No pretending I have everything figured out.
Just what I’m learning, what’s working, what isn’t, and what might help someone else who is thinking about starting a voice-over journey of their own.
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