I'm not happy doing the same thing for long periods of time, so I have tended to make significant changes in how I earn a living every 8-12 years. The only common denominator is that I have been a freelance writer since 1974. But, I've also done many other things as side hustles.
My time in the USAF was very interesting. I enlisted because I had dropped out of college as one of those life changes, and found myself high on the draft list, so I arranged with a USAF recruiter to enlist immediately if I got a draft notice. That happened. During Basic Training, I found myself, one day, taking a language aptitude test. Oddly enough, it was a test that I had studied in a course on testing in the Psychology Department at my college. It was an interesting test, because it involved a made-up language to see how quickly those tested could learn a basic vocabulary and grammar.
So, since I had studied that test before, I did rather well on it that day, and found myself shipped off to a total immersion Russian language school at Syracuse University, in a class made up of other college dropouts and general misfits. I did very well in that 9-month course, and soon after it, found myself at a tiny USAF base on the Black Sea in Turkey, doing things I can't talk about. There, I developed some unusual skills and abilities, which resulted me finishing my enlistment by working in the NSA, which I also can't talk about.
After the USAF, I moved on to other things, returned to college, and ended up being a moderately successful freelance writer. A few years ago, one of my contracts was writing the content for a large website for an international translation company. What I had learned so many years ago came back into play. It's an odd, odd world, which makes for many interesting experiences if you're not locked into anything in particular.
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