Just finished reading Black Enteprise’s cover story and online Q&A with the Queen of All Media about how she grew herself into a mogul and her company into a giant. She said a few things that I had to post here because I think they’d resonate so much with young people trying to find their way:

On her early career as a TV anchor, Oprah said she was unhappy despite having a job that most would have traded an arm for:

“When I was 25, my journals were filled with frustration about not achieving a life of meaning, frustration because I was an anchorwoman and–from the outside looking in–I had what everyone else wanted…This was the job everyone would think you [would] want to have. And I was immensely unhappy because it didn’t hold meaning for me.”

Years later, she learned from a mistake she made in aligning herself with the Oxygen cable network by just being still:

 ”This is how you know it’s the wrong decision: when you have to ask anybody other than yourself. That’s how you know it’s the wrong decision…When you get still, you know. Anytime you go around asking, it means you are trying to get somebody else to convince you.”

Read the entire interview with Black Enterprise’s Sonia Alleyne here.

“What’s your sidehustle?”

That’s what I was asked last night by this cat my boy introduced me to at a sushi bar. Not the first time I’ve been asked, but what made it significant was that he was less interested in what my 9-to-5 was than what I did when I was griding after hours. He puts in his 40-hours in sales at a big company here in Ohio, but dabbles in real estate on the side. My friend who made the intro works for another big corporation, but is a party promoter in his “spare time.” My regular job, I told him, is at a newspaper, but my sidehustle is blogging, writing for magazines and doing radio.

Point being — and this is something I posted about before — we’re in the middle of a sea change in the workforce and that brief conversation last night summed it up. Young professionals have grown so disinterested in spending a career working for any one company, or for anyone at all, that our side jobs — that thing that you do for the love but is more than a hobby because you do it for the money as well — often hold more relevance in conversation than whatever you actually do to make a living. It’s simply assumed these days that if you work for anyone other than yourself, you’re not doing what you really  want to do, and people would rather skip to talking about what your big dream is.

So what’s your sidehustle? What would you drop your regular job for in a second to have a fleeting shot at?

My homegirl put me on to this list of top cities for young professionals, and I had to wonder who they asked. An accompanying story explained that cities with higher percentages of productive young adults tend to have faster-growing economies than ones that don’t. That makes perfect sense, since young people start more companies than older folks and among this generation and tend to spend more, too (we’re just buying first houses, cars, having first kids, and all that pumps money into a city).

I can’t help but think, though, that they’d have a different top five (Raleigh, Austin, D.C., Vegas and Phoenix made the list here) if one of the criteria had been where do young black adults want to live. Austin may be attracting young people overall, but I know a sister in her early 30s who just ran kicking and screaming out of there because of its lack of diversity. Sista couldn’t buy a decent date, and trust me, fellas, she’s hot.

I like Vegas to gamble, but I’m not about to move out to the desert. There’s no way Atlanta and Chicago don’t join D.C. on the list of top cities for young professionals among most of my friends. And that’s more significant than just one clique’s collective opinion, given research that shows that young adults of this generation tend to choose where they want to live first, and then look for a job, as opposed to vice-versa. Cities that don’t rank high on young people’s list can bet they’ll be in for economic trouble in the coming 20 years.

So what’s your to five? Where do you want to live now, and where would you want to “settle down”

Do you think you’ll work for same company your entire career? I know I won’t.

Our generation mostly views jobs as means to a greater end that usually includes branching out on our own. Among my friends, who all have well-paying jobs, one would rather be in politics, another has a cookbook, screenplays and a restaurant up her sleeve and  another just took a new job two months ago and is already yearning for something new, though she’s not sure what that is yet. I talked to someone else this morning who quit a gig working for a major sports franchise on faith and has since started her own PR firm working with pro athletes as clients.

People leaving their jobs to be entrepreneurs is nothing new in America, but that accelerates when the economy goes south and people are worried about their jobs. So what’s your plan b? What do you really  want to do and what’s your plan to get there?