How to Find FullFilling Work
Nowadays the work which pays is not enough but providing satisfaction and fulfillment has become a necessity. This has become rather painfully necessary and is a recent invention.
It's a big ask and help to explain why so many of us have career crises often on a Sunday evening as the Sun begins to set.
To help us on the quest here are 6 thoughts from the book: How to Find Fulfilling Work
Being confused about careers is perfectly normal
In a pre-industrial world there were, at most some 2000 different trades out there. Nowadays there are estimated to be half a million different options.
The result: we can become so anxious about making the wrong choice we end up making no choice at all. Psychologists call this, The Paradox of Choice, paralysis stemming from too many options.
We should acknowledge that confusion is natural and fear entirely normal
Know Yourself
It's the oldest philosophical recommendation and has particular relevance to careers. 99% of us knowing what we want to do does not arise spontaneously, like for example, knowing what to eat
Most of us don't have a calling. We do not hear a commanding GOD like voice directing us to management or sales or marketing.
That is not to say we don't have taste or inclinations. We just do not know them clearly enough which is very difficult position to be in. As not having a plan quickly puts us at the mercy of those who do have one.
We only catch glimpses of little hints of our tastes.
So what we have to do is learn to pick up on their faint sounds:
- Start by parking any concerns for money for a time.
- Financial panic is too often kills all dialogue with more authentic, passionate sides of one's future.
- Write down, without being too logical or analytical about it, everything you have enjoyed doing or making which might include taking photographs, organizing events. The weirder and more offbeat list, the better.
- In the long and confused tangle that follows there will, somewhere be the shape of an ideal future working self.
- It will be very messed up and in need of being analyzed thoroughly. Thats where philosophy comes in. Philosophy is the art clearing up and demanding logic of our first thoughts.
Thinking a lot
It might take a couple of days, even a week to chose a new car, it would, fairly take a year or more to sustained daily reflection to start to identify career that fits.
We tend to feel guilty about this: Imagining we are being self-indulgent-far from it.
We may need to empty every weekend for months to sort out the biggest conundrum of our lives. To make sure don't continue to spend the rest of our lives trapped in a job unwittingly chosen for us by our younger selves.
We need to properly be generous about the amount of time we will need to give this.
In Search of Courage
It's tempting to imagine we will be able to work out the shape of the workplace and of our characters simply through pure process of reflection.
But we need data and can only understand ourselves and others by colliding with the real world in the process of getting to know both it and our own natures.
We need to take small, non-irrevocable steps to gather information, for example, shadowing, interning or volunteering.
We must not think we always have to resign on Monday. We can investigate our futures through branching projects on the side of existing jobs.
Belonging to Freedom
Reflect on what makes people unhappy.
Every successful business is at heart an attempt to solve someone else's problem. The bigger and more urgent problem, the greater the opportunity.
To flex your entrepreneurial muscles, consider an average day and everything in that might make someone unhappy:
From losing the house keys, to finding food a little greasy, to arguing yet again with their spouse.
Each of these is a business opportunity waiting to be exploited. It's a chance for us to serve which is what work really is.
It is easy to imagine that everything has been done and tried nonsense. We are unhappy enough for capitalism to have many more centuries of invention and creativity to it.
Be confident
So many bad self help books are about confidence. It can be tempting to dismiss the whole topic as nonsense. But in a peculiar and rather humbling way it really does seem as if the difference between success and failure is sometimes nothing less than the courage to give it a go.
The ability to imagine oneself into a role, to surmise one does not need to ask anyone for permission and that many of the top positions simply belong to those who dare to boldly ask for them.
A lack of confidence is at heart a misunderstanding of the way the world works. It is an internalized feudalism which imagines that only certain people but not oneself have the right preordained to get certain things.
It isn't true.
As we know a lot more is possible than we might think at our moments of timidity and doubt.
That's a start of the path towards a job we won't regret on our death beds which should always be the ultimate criterion.
