Working a 9 to 5 is highly over-rated and so is earning a paycheque. People base so much of their lives on their job and forget that living isn’t about working, it’s about living. How then, can we combine the joy of living with the need for an income? A dream job?
A dream job is an outlet where you achieve and feel fulfilled. You want a dream job because you want to feel like you are making a difference and you’re making a difference when you are helping other people. After all, isn’t that all a job is? People pay you to do something for them or provide them with something, tangible or not.
If you help other people get what they want, and allow them to see the value in what you offer, you in turn will get everything you want and feel fulfilled.
You have been living someone else’s life, achieving someone else’s goals.
It’s time to set your own rules, to play your own game. To have the courage to say “I will not settle anymore and I am tired of listening to other people.” When you do this, you set your own standards and you are able to enjoy the process of life and appreciate when you have achieved your goal. Imagine yourself living by your own standards and the freedom that comes with it. This sounds easy right? Just quit your job and travel the world, go on shopping sprees, play hockey all day and party all night. Oh wait, we need money, I guess we still need to work. But while work is a necessary part of life, unhappy or unfulfilled work doesn’t need to be part of the deal.
Success is much easier than fulfillment. Why? Because success is external and fulfillment is internal. It is much more challenging to identify your own standards than to borrow those of others, of what society places on us. The real benefit of stealing other people’s standards is that if you fail, you can blame them and not yourself. This is the benefit, but is it really that great when it comes with the price tag of failure just because it comes prepackaged with a scapegoat? There is no long term fulfillment with external motivators.
My buddy is an Account Executive for a fortune 100 software company (as I once was) and travels across North America. He has week stays in New York, dining with clients. Travels to LA, San Fran, Austin, and even Raleigh North Carolina (which have some of the nicest people in the States by the way). He makes a great income, has car and cell phone allowances, company credit cards, stock options, the works. But he’s miserable. No matter how much money he makes or how many interesting projects he is working on, he’s always thinking about what he doesn’t have and he’s always thinking of that because he’d rather be doing something else.
He’s achieving success externally, but hardly fulfilled internally. A dream job is where both your talents and interests collide. Your talents will allow you to achieve, and your interests will allow you to be fulfilled. The real trick is to do what you love, what you have passion for and still be able to monetize it. Sounds easy right? We all know it’s not or else all we’d see on Monday mornings are smiley happy faces, eager and ready to start the week. But instead Mondays suck. To those of you who are making a living that is comfortable for you and allows you freedom to express your creativity, knowledge and interests, I envy you. To those of you who are brave enough to say “Screw this, I quit. Life’s too short to be spending 9 hours a day unhappy.” and take a plunge into the unknown for a chance of something better, I salute you. To those of you who stay at your positions, moping day in and day out, complaining that your life sucks while doing nothing about it, I pity you.
Listen. Screw this. I quit.
This email pretty much sums up how the majority of high ticket item business to consumer sales go. Used cars, low end software, boiler room stocks, bond lotteries, customized business mentoring, life coaching Tony Robbins seminars, all that and a bag of 99 cent chips. After you’re done the $9,750 seminar, you walk out pumped and ready to take life head on! Make a difference! Change the world! but all you’ll ever get for your return on investment is $0.99 for the bag of All Dressed Doritos and some Bread Garden sandwiches for lunch.
When I was in Beijing in June, my friends and I were at an outdoor food market. My mandarin is so-so and I walked up to a drink vendor and asked if they had any watermelon juice. She looked at me confused and then handed me some straws. I said no, WAT-ER-MELON JUICE (in slow, drawn out broken mandarin). She handed me more straws. When you’re interacting with people, there’s a lot of differences in what they perceive your meaning as versus what you are actually trying to say. The spoken language is an easy one to determine as you either get it or you don’t, but what about other types of languages? Could the meaning of intention be misunderstood as well if two people don’t speak the same language? I read this book called ‘The 5 languages of Love’ by Gary Chapman (Yes I’m a guy and I will read everything you put in front of me).
There was a girl I knew a few years back (my ex made me stop being friends with her) who was a slut. I knew at least 8 guys who had been with her and heard stories about a dozen more. Everyone knew her though, and she was a nice girl. She had a few close girlfriends and people generally liked her. There wasn’t anything bad you could say about her, other than she was like Dan Cloutier in the playoffs, everyone gets to score.
In the world of business, it’s the same. I look at having a job as being in a relationship, and being unemployed is the same as being single. *Disclaimer: Not that I find being in a relationship a job, but rather that there’s commitment, responsibilities, and accountability involved as well. (Nice save Pi!) If you accept the first job offer that comes your way without thought into your own personal needs and wants from that career, it’s not going to work out in the long run. You need to make sure that both the career is right for you and that you are right for that opportunity and not just take it because it was given to you. At the same time, you shouldn’t apply to every job and then quit after working there a day either. Sooner or later no company will want to hire you because of your track record. Even if you don’t sleep with any of them, all those guys you string along makes you look bad too.
