Consider the trajectories of our careers. Most of us were committed to and already pretty good at whatever it is we do, by the time we were 20 years old or so. So much destiny determined so early on.

In the few short years between gaining consciousness and moving out of the house, you evaluated dozens or hundreds of possible interests and fine-tuned your natural skills, gravitating toward some career track that promised a rewarding and happy life. And you still had time left over to goof off with friends, watch TV, play video games, and sleep as much as humanly possible.

So what if you made the wrong choice? Most people I know are paralyzed by the thought of having to start over, but it doesn’t take that much work to learn a new trade. It’s the passion and determination that are impossible to fake.

Corey Peterson recently trusted his instincts and gave up a career as a software developer at Apple. Speaking of his years in college:

I quickly realized that EE was not my forte […] but I stubbornly stayed with the engineering part of my degree. There was no HCI [Human-Computer Interaction] program at ISU back then, and if I had known those programs existed I would have done things differently.

OK, to be fair he’s only giving up one career at Apple for another, but he’s achieving his dream of being a human interface designer. It takes guts to pull everything off the table, jumble it around, and start building again from scratch. Kudos to Corey, and good luck!

What amazes and appalls me is the extreme resistance most people have to rocking the boat of their career. I recently spoke with a guy in his mid-20’s who insisted he would stick with Perl programming even though he’s become passionate about Cocoa and the Mac. The reason? He’s a relatively big fish in the Perl pond, and doesn’t want to give up on that comfortable dominion. Sucks to be you, dude. And it will suck even more as each decade passes.

The good news is, unless you’ve lived an utterly single-tracked life, you’ve already got a head start in your new career. Whatever you’ve been quietly interested in for the past 5, 10, 20, 40? years, but haven’t been getting paid for, could be your next big move. You’re pretty darned good as far as a hobby is concerned, and it won’t take much work to fine-tune those skills into something marketable. Take a class. Adopt a practice regimen. You might even get away with honing your skills while goofing off with friends, watching TV, playing video games, and sleeping as much as humanly possible. It’s never too late to start over.

Since I acquired and renovated Black Ink, it’s been cranking along steadily winning the hearts of Mac-loving crossword solvers. Thankfully I have a group of really dedicated solvers who seem to find the strangest bugs. Black Ink 1.0.7 fixes an issue where puzzles that contain multi-character answers (like “CAT” all crammed into a single square) were not being detected as “correct,” and therefore not triggering the congratulatory hurrah dialog.

This release also restores the ability to zoom the puzzle’s size in and out by keyboard shortcut. For many MacXword fans, this was a major omission in Black Ink, so I hope they’ll be pleased by the new functionality.

Black Ink 1.0.7

• Menu items for making puzzle larger/smaller
• Add keyboard shortcut for opening web puzzle chooser
• Fix correctly-solved detection for puzzles with multi-character answers

I’ve been telling anybody who will listen, since even before I acquired MarsEdit, that if you want to be a significant member of the Mac developer community, you need to have a blog. In fact, you need a blog even if you’re not a Mac developer. It’s good for your business, it’s good for your social life, and it can even be good for your ego. You don’t have to use MarsEdit to write it, but you need to have one. Case closed.

And if you’ve been slow to pick up the habit, you better get moving. People from all professions and social circles are learning how important blogging is to staying connected in our modern digital world. Kevin O’Keefe is a former trial lawyer who is now trying to impress upon other lawyers the importance of marketing yourself on the web, with his own blog: Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

That’s right. Even the lawyers are blogging now. The “no duh” wisdom of starting a blog is spreading like wildfire. You have to ask yourself now if you’re involved with technology, do you want your lawyer to have a blog before you do?

My friend Oliver Brown once related to me some wisdom he had learned, I believe from his grandmother: “Everybody has at least one novel in them.” And the same is more than true when it comes to blogs. There’s a successful blog in you, you just need to figure out what it is. So what are you waiting for?

Here are common excuses I hear for not blogging, and my reaction to them:

Excuse: “Nobody reads/will read my blog…”

Well, duh. That’s because you haven’t written anything in 3 months, and the last time you did, it was about what you ate for breakfast. You can write more often and you can choose a topical area to focus on. What’s amazing about the web is it truly is so huge and there are so many people hungry for content, that your blog will gain a readership as long as you keep working at it.

Excuse: “I don’t have anything to say…”

If you can’t think of anything interesting to say, you might have to face the sad possibility that you’re not an interesting person. But that’s almost certainly not true. You just need to figure out what you do that’s interesting, and then share it.

Perhaps what makes you interesting is the way you solve programming bugs on the Mac, or perhaps it’s your extensive knowledge of postage stamps. Every time you get excited about something and wish you could share your discovery with somebody, the blog is your answer.

Maybe you share it with the world, or maybe you just share it with your close friends and family. Lots of people these days run more than one blog. A professional blog. A baby blog. A hobby blog. A humor blog. What makes you special? Who can you keep in touch with, educate, or entertain by way of a blog?

Excuse: “I’m not a very good writer…”

Blogs are conventionally prose-oriented, but there’s no reason they need to be exclusively so. If what you have to share is visual, then post photos or drawings to your blog. If you’re a wonderful orator, start a podcast (just another word for an audio blog). Perhaps your talent is writing one-line humorous quips; nobody says your blog entries need to be longer than one sentence! Math nerd? How about a “Proof of the Week” blog, or similar puzzling challenges for your readers?

Excuse: “I can’t blog because my employer won’t let me…”

First of all, what you do in your personal time is your business. If you’ve convinced yourself that your job can be jeopardized by engaging in a social life outside your company, then I’m really sad for you and your situation. Sucks to be you!

What’s more likely is you simply can’t blog specifically about what you’re working on. So what? Is that all you have to share with the world? Even if you can’t blog about the specifics of your work, I’m betting you can find oblique topics that relate your experiences with those of other people.

And if you’re really, truly scared for your job? Don’t blog under your real name. Sites like Blogger and WordPress make it a snap to set up a free blog that is very difficult to trace back to you. How do you think Fake Steve Jobs got away with his shenanigans for so long?

Excuse: “I don’t have time to blog…”

There’s a reason I put this one last. You’ve read this far through my blog? Don’t you have better things to do!? If you’re spending time reading other peoples’ blogs then you’ve obviously set aside some time in your busy schedule to engage with the world blogging community. The fact that you’re spending all that time listening and none of it speaking is just a matter of allocation. Join the conversation.

Lots of people don’t realize how little time it can take to run a blog. With modern publishing systems, adding new content is literally as easy as typing it into a text field and clicking “Send,” or “Publish,” or “Save.”

You’ve just got to take the leap and start your first blog. Once you do, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.

If you’re running your own business and receiving a majority of your payments via PayPal (or if you make so much money that even a minority is a lot of cash), then you need to know about something called PayPal’s Merchant Rate.

I first learned about this from Andy Kim, who wrote to the macsb mailing list with a link to an article similar to this one, by Nathaniel Brown. The bottom line? If you bring in more than $3000/month via PayPal, then you’re probably getting charged more than you need to for your transactions.

The basic rate for PayPal transactions in the US is 2.9% + $0.30. If you bring in more than $3000/month, that rate goes down to 2.5%, and if you bring in $10,000/month (lucky you!) the rate goes down to 2.2%.

PayPal’s rates are publicly disclosed, and it’s pretty obvious that the rate gets lower as you make more money. So why am I posting this? Why did Nathaniel post about it? Why did Andy send the link out to the mailing list? Because there’s one extremely annoying, extremely important gotcha: you have to ask for the discount in order to get it.

Yep, even if you’re bringing in $95,000/month, earning PayPal thousands in commissions, they will patiently charge you the maximum rate until you go out of your way to apply for your discount. And when you do, it only affects transactions from that point forward.

So if you make more than $3000/month from PayPal, chances are you’ve been getting ripped off for months or years, and don’t know it.

To apply for the discount, follow these “simple” steps:

1. Login to your business PayPal account.
2. Click the “Fees” link at the very bottom of the page.
3. Click the link in the fees schedule that says “1.9%-2.9% + 0.30”.
4. Find and click the link to “Apply” for merchant pricing.

If your experience is like mine, your application will be automatically approved based on your PayPal revenues from the last calendar month. Since the rate you get is determined rather crudely from those revenues, if you expect this month to be much better than last month, then you might wait until next month to make the application.

In any case, if you make more than $3000/month from PayPal, this is a very easy step that will save you $12/month (or much, much more) in fees. Enjoy!