In retrospect, my whole life led me towards journalism. I started reading The New York Times on Sundays in elementary school. I obsessively read news magazines, science magazines, and the daily paper. As it became for many of you, The New Yorker assumed a most-favored-publication status in my bathroom and prolonged bed-time far too often. In my early 30s, after a decade of freelancing, I landed a staff job at a national business publication. Then I left. Leaving journalism was one of the hardest things I ever did. There were many reasons - salary pressures, changes in management, disenchantment with the profession. None of these are unusual or strange. But like most journalists, I simply could not imagine a life doing anything else. It was impossible.

How ironic that leaving journalism and spending a single year in my next career path taught me more about journalism than I had learned in 15 years as a full-time journalist. First, full disclosure is in order. I left to go into the world of finance. I became a researcher working for the massive hedge funds and mutual funds that I used to write about. It's a new and emerging field that is probably more similar than dissimilar to journalism. There are also parallels to professions some call "competitive intelligence" or even "corporate espionage." Whatever. My job, in a nutshell, is to find people that have useful information, extract that information, judge its value, and either connect those people with my clients or summarize the information. In other words, it's like journalism without the writing part.

Read more of Anonymous' thoughts here.