You are not your job. Imagine if you will that you are at a
party or a dinner, meeting some new people and the conversation is
flowing nicely. Eventually, and no matter how hard you try to avoid the
question somebody will always begin the inevitable rounds of finding
out what each of do you do to earn a living. Personally, I dread this
question, but then my job is nothing glamorous, to answer the fateful
question I put on my happiest grimace and try to make my job sound as
interesting as possible. Usually I end up confusing the questioner who
was expecting a far simpler answer, but then this is not a bad result
in the end.
Other people will say what they do to earn a crust and
most will be uninteresting or illicit no reaction and then somebody
will say what they do and it will be like a slap in the face, more so
because the smug bastard who has just said his profession knows he has
something good. I become Jealous and on more than one later occasion I
will curse myself for miss-spending my youth and not having the
foresight or the metal to be doing that job that I to can be proud of.
As I become older and possibly wiser it dawns on me, usually on a
Sunday night after a day fighting a terrible hangover and the thought
of going back to work the following day not filling me with happiness, that
I need to find a path that I am truly happy with. The 20 or so minutes
I spend tossing and turning before going to sleep doesn’t seem to
deliver the answers that I so desire and more and more I find myself
thinking about this task in my waking hours. It has reached a stage
where decisions need to be made and paths chosen and started upon. Unfortunately,
there is nobody to help in my quest to uncover what the perfect job may
be for me, for the final decision must rest with me. Further troubling
is that to fully understand a profession you really have to work in it,
which with no experience or training is impossible. So it must come
down to considering some major factors and using these to face in the
right direction and then charge down the chosen path – for time is
wasting and I will be too old if I leave this decision much longer.

The
factors that I can identify are money, power, creativeness (as in use
of one’s mind to form new ideas or solve problems), social standing,
enjoyment of work, and satisfaction of work. Different people will
weigh these factors in their own ways and some people might only take
into consideration only two of the factors. I can imagine many readers
snorting here and saying most people consider only money, and sadly
this is probably true for many people. Money is always going to be a
factor but with some brief introspection I find that creativeness,
social standing and satisfaction of work are highly important for me. I
also give importance to a high level of human contact, this being vital
to any career that I undertake seriously in the future. Power and
enjoyment of work might be important to others but to me they are not
essential, obviously though I don’t want to find the work totally dull
and have to be the bottom feeder taking orders from anybody and
everybody. After much deliberation I have identified several jobs as
being potential candidates and these are physiotherapist, journalist
and language interpreter.  After doing the thinking
behind writing this article I feel somewhat closer to deciding what do
to with my life. Hopefully you have got something more than the
workings of my mind. Hopefully it will make you think a little bit more
about your station in life. I know far too many talented people who are
working jobs simply to pay the bills, get by and go to the pub on the
weekend. I think there is a saying that goes ‘you should not live to
work, but work to live’. That may be true, but I don’t think your
everyday person realises just how much time and effort they put into
their jobs. Sometimes I wonder if there is only a limited number of
exciting and cool jobs out there and everybody else is stuck sitting in
front of a computer working on some dull project. Wouldn’t it be nice
though, if our society could endure it if more and more people started
to follow a course to their dream jobs. Perhaps there would be less
multinationals, call centres and chains in the world being replaced by
original ideas for business run by people who believe in what they are
doing.