Hello, My Name is Inigo Montoya.

My name is Mark. As of this writing I am 45 years old. I am married and have two children. I live in Atlanta and I have been a Product Manager in the Internet Technology space since, well, since the Internet really mattered. If you don't know what a Product Manager is, don't worry about it. Most people don't. My wife still has only the vaguest idea of what I do every day. Suffice it to say we are an important part of the process that creates all the hardware and software you rely on today and most people don't fully appreciate Product Management until it's no longer there (you know who you are, Engineering.) No, I’m not bitter about it.

I created this blog because, five years from now, I don't want to be a Product Manager. Oh, I still enjoy it well enough and I'm pretty good at it. There's still something very satisfying about closing the quarter and seeing your product revenues up 30% and having customers tell you that your solution is awesome. But, over the past year or so, I've begun to feel a slow burn for something new, something fresh, something different. Not right away, mind you. Maybe in five years.

My wife thinks this is the seed of a mid-life crisis. It doesn't feel that way to me. I'm not wanting a Porsche or Ferrari or Testosterossa or whatever. I'm not trying to recapture the glory days of my youth. (Which, I can tell you right now, were nothing to write songs about. President of the Math Club only carries so much glory and don't get me started on the cheerleaders.) Still, there's something there. Some indefinable hunger that I can't quite put my finger on. And wives are right more often than husbands care to admit.

Anyway, my problem is this: What exactly do I want to be doing five years from now? Until I figure this out, it's hard to steer my career in the right direction.

So I'm going to treat this like any good Product Manager would and create a research project. My goal is to analyze myself like I would a market or a buyer. I want to understand myself well enough to figure out what I truly, truly, in my heart, want to be doing in five years. And then I want to execute a plan to achieve that goal.

This blog will document my journey. What I do, what I learn, where I succeed, and where I fail. I commit to complete honesty and total transparency.

If you're reading this and you're not a relative slogging through it out of a misplaced sense of obligation, maybe you're feeling the same way. Maybe you've caressed an occasional secret thought about a bookshop or an animal rescue service or a career as a nurse or a back-up singer. So many of us fall into jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with planning or self-awareness. We all have to pay the bills. But it's never too late to ask where your heart's desire truly lies. Life's too short not to dream.