What if you can’t find a job you love?

by Jen (January 11, 2008)

There’s an interesting discussion at GetRichSlowly about how to find a job you love. It’s a good read, and I don’t want to steal their thunder, so I’ll just say the two things I have to add.

Find a good company. The most wonderful job in the world can be hell if you’re working for crazy or nasty people. And a fairly crappy job can seem kind of wonderful if you have a company that values you and treats you with respect and fairness. Even if they don’t pay enough - seriously, who you have to work with and for matters.

In my case, I realized early on there was no job I wanted. I wanted to write fiction for a living, which is not something you get a degree in and then get recruited into a nice fiction-writing firm with a stock bonus plan. If you’re like me, there are two ways to handle this:

1. Accept a job that’s kind of like what you wanted. For example, I could’ve gone to school and become a journalist - it’s not fiction, but it’s writing for a living. The reason I didn’t is that if I spent all day writing for other people, I didn’t think I’d have the creative energy left over to write for myself.
2. Get a day job. Look for something that pays the bills, is low stress and doesn’t require overtime. Then spend time outside your job doing the work you love until you convince someone to pay you for that work.

It’s also important to realize that you may just plain guess wrong when you’re 20 and deciding on a major. You may put in all the work to become a lawyer, but find the market for lawyers is just too competitive and you can’t do the sort of work you want. Or you may love the work you do for twenty years and suddenly wake up one day and realize you’re suffocating and you’d rather own a bait and tackle shop. Or your family may pressure you to go into engineering for job security when you’d be much happier as a graphic artist, even if the money’s tight.

When you’re young, there’s so much horrible pressure to decide once and for all how you’re going to spend the next forty-some freakin’ years of your life, and all I can say to that is: relax. You cannot possibly predict where you’re going to be in 20 years or how you’re going to feel about it.

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