It’s quite common to be told to find a job you love, or follow your passion and the money will follow. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always seem to work out so conveniently for everyone.
So what is one to do when they can’t earn a living from their passion, or at least they haven’t figured out a way to do so yet? My answer to this is if you can’t find a job you love, find a job that will let you do something else you need to do anyway. For instance, if you want to get a good workout, you might consider a job in construction. If you want to learn more about money, you might try banking. You might have to get creative, but the idea is to pick a job that will let you pursue something you’d like to pursue anyway, even if the job itself is about something different. Naturally, when you do this, you’ll need basic competency in the area you hope to work, otherwise you simply won’t be qualified for the job. But through working in a field relating to the area you’d like to improve, you’ll improve in that area through constantly working with it. Just hit whatever basic competency you need, and from there you’ll be golden.
Getting a job with this purpose in mind is good because you’ll be more motivated to go to work, since working will be helping you to meet a goal you have in addition to paying the rent. While it may not be doing what you love, it is killing two birds with one stone, so you have more time outside of work to dedicate to other things.
The reason I bring this up is that there are a lot of people looking for ways to do what they love, and they aren’t finding a way to do it. I’m one of them, though I’m still working on it. In the meantime, we may as well get the most out of the jobs we have. We may not love what we’re doing, but we can at least be happy about the results we get. As long as it’s not mind-numbing work, perhaps that will be enough until we move on to the really fun stuff. There’s no reason not to find a way to make work as good as you can make it until you find work or another career path you don’t need to make better.
Naturally, I’d always recommend you take the dream job first. But in the event it simply isn’t available to you, or won’t pay the bills, consider the alternative of using your job to meet another goal you may have while you work. Keep pursuing the dream job if you wish, just keep your backup plan something you won’t mind doing as well.
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Tony
April 29th, 2010
Interesting article. It’s not always easy to profit from your passions. And though that might be the ideal, it isn’t always practical. We do need to learn to get the most we can from our jobs. The idea of getting something out of the job, apart from money, is an interesting perspective. In any job there are tasks we like and those we don’t – I’ve being trying to arrange things so I do more of the things I like and less of the things I don’t – it seems to be working
floslib
May 2nd, 2010
Yeah, I’m working on rearranging to do things I like more often too. Still have to pay the bills though, so in the meantime, I figure I may as well get what I can out of my job.