Choices

When thinking about your career, there’s two ways to go about it: One, you think about what you love doing, what you want to do, and you go give it your all, hoping you can make a living doing that. This is generally the advice handed out by many. But there’s a second way.

Think about the living standard you want and work your way back from there. Think about what you want in life: A family? A car? Are you good with an apartment or do you want a house? How many vacations do you want to take per year, and what kind? How much do you want to travel?

What hobbies do you enjoy? What’s that going to cost you? How much money do you need to make per month to afford all that? Okay, what kind of a job pays like that? And of those jobs, which ones do you think you can/could do? What kind of education do you need to get into that job?

This approach has the benefit that you narrow down your choices as you work down the list. The Do-What-You-Love/Want approach has the downside of not doing that, there’s a thousand choices to pick from. And what about “what you want to do for a living” narrows it down?

I like football, so do I become an athlete, or a footballer or is football the hobby I want to finance while doing something else? The second way is much clearer because it gives you a tangiable goal: make X amount of money/month.

Working backwards, this has the upside of creating realistic goals and milestones/markers of success that you can work down like a checklist. And that gives you some place to start. The question is: Do you want to work for yourself, or do you want to be an employee?

Because Option A – “Do what you want” – can easily lead to you being self-employed. But it comes with the prospect of charging ahead on your own, taking on all that financial risk on your own, with no tangible job skills that you could bounce back to if you failed.

Option B is limited, in that you have to pick from existing job, but also jobs that you know about. Like, could be that two (2) years into your apprenticeship you find out about another, more fitting career path and now you want to switch.

But if you pick something, you have a structured approach and a goal to work towards to, and you are very clear about your motivations. You know what the end result looks like for you, and you tailor your life and everything around it to go get it. That’s what gets work done.

Too many people being told to turn their passion into a career, leading to a lot of disillusioned adults struggling in crowded job markets, ultimately ending up in jobs that they did not need a degree for in the first place, and getting paid less than they wanted. Don’t be that.