Before You Find The Job You Love

There has been a lot said about the Importance of finding and doing work that you love. It perhaps, became even more mainstream after what is now considered the most popular commencement speech of all time, delivered by Steve Jobs at the 2005 Stanford Commencement event, particularly the following lines:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

Work is important and integral to our lives; there is a great truth to the fact that work fill a large part of our lives because we are going to expend a great chunk of our prime lives working on a job, and hence, it is important that it adds to us, rather than depreciate us, it is vital to enjoy the work you do.

According to a New York Times article quoting The European Journal of Epidemiology, the risk of a heart attack was about 20 percent greater on Mondays for adult men, and 15 percent greater for adult women. ¹ It is not so hard to see the connection; people who are going to jobs they dread, jobs that drains the life and essence out of them will likely dread Monday mornings, and it eventually takes a toll on their health. Harvard Health also released a paper on the same subject with similar findings.²

Who would not like to work on a job that doesn’t feel like work, where work feels like play? But then, it is important to separate the fantasy from the reality because we do not live in an ideal world.

Before you get down to doing the job you love, you’d a likely have had to do a lot of job you might not necessarily love to do. This is an important process for building character.

Everything comes at a price. The non-dream jobs that you have to do is the price for the dream job that you love. While you wait to be worthy of your dream job, the current job you work at should serve as a platform to help you learn and acquire the needed skills, competence, expertise and experience that is needed to get you to become worthy of the job you love. Don’t put forth a wrong attitude to it, don’t make like it is beneath you.

As a rule, don’t give less than your best to anything that your commit your time and attention to. Strength of character is built when you pay as much diligence to your less-than-ideal work, as you would if it were your ideal job. In the words of the great revolutionary, Martin Luther King Junior, ‘if a man has been called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well’.³

While you wait for the dream job, work on your present job like it is the best job that there is. If your job doesn’t give you dignity like you hoped, you can dignify it yourself. It is about whom you become in the process of working. If you do the job, you don’t like with the needed diligence, it will add up to helping you get the job that you want.

To interpret Mr. Jobs’ advice as not taking up any job that is available if it is less than your idea job, will be a complete misrepresentation of what he likely had in mind. Keep looking, don’t settle is not to say you do nothing or pass up less jobs while you are yet to be qualified for that ideal, dream job.

The way to get the job that you love without settling is to take on the job available and work at it as diligently as you would have worked on your ideal job.

So, keep growing, don’t settle; and work on yourself while your work at your job.

1. [https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/health/the-claim-heart-attacks-are-more-common-on-mondays.html]

2. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/time-sensitive-clues-about-cardiovascular-risk]
3. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21045-if-a-man-is-called-to-be-a-street-sweeper]