By Gladys Mae
Gladys is the Associate Director of Admissions & Student Services with over 10 years of experience at the International Career Institute.
When it comes to choosing a career, the advice of many people is to think with your head and not your heart. Obviously, the advice of most people isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, so you don’t want to listen too closely to what the average man in the street thinks, unless you’re gathering material for a comedy routine.
The problem is that this kind of thinking (head over heart) is derived from a message that is drummed into children repeatedly from a young age in countries with developed economies, which is that the world is a big scary place full of uncertainty.
The ingrained subtext, which can be hard to shake off, is that security is paramount. In these societies, people are also usually taught to value money as being synonymous with success. It’s only natural, then, that the advice of most people is centred around job security and potential earnings.
The message from schools and the media needs to be this way because of the bottom 80% that keeps the top 1% adequately stocked with truffles and champagne. The elites, of course, would like the remaining 19% to keep quiet. No sense in encouraging the ‘dreamers’, or who will man the factories and warehouses?
If you’re reading these words, it probably means you’re already switched on. You’re not prepared to meekly join the chorus being bleated all around you, because you’ve realised there are possibilities beyond what society seems willing to offer the average person. In fact, you’d shun the title of ‘average’ the way a vampire shuns garlic. The mantle of mediocrity is not for you.
Unless your passion is a religious one, or you want to join some sort of commune, money is usually a necessity. And you may indeed, at first, have to make the acquisition of it a priority. Unfortunately, that’s where most people tend to stop, because of that scary message that they must actively protect any job they’re lucky enough to get.
Following that path does not lead to happiness. The higher paying accessible careers tend to be that way because not many people want to do them. You can certainly make a lot of money doing them, but it’s not likely you’ll wake up everyday feeling enthusiastic about what you do.
One important thing to consider is that just because you have a job, doesn’t mean you have to stay in it. Job security for a job you don’t want to have doesn’t really make any sense, if you think about it properly.
If you’re not currently doing what you want to be doing, you need to be planning how you’re going to change that situation.
Getting out of bed every morning to go and do something you don’t want to never gets easier. In fact, the longer you do it, the more difficult it gets. The stress this produces can only have a negative effect on your life, and can even shorten it, courtesy of all the cortisol accumulating in your system.
But getting out of bed to go and do something you love never feels like a struggle. Remember the Saturday Morning Effect? Kids that practically have to dragged out of bed to go to school from Monday to Friday are suddenly wide awake on Saturday morning, eager to watch cartoons and deny anyone else the chance of a lazy weekend.
The secret is that doing work you love doing doesn’t feel like work at all. It truly gives you pleasure, and because of that, you can devote yourself to it without remorse.
Apart from the obvious factors, here are a few of the benefits that will arise from moving out of a dead-end job and embracing your passion:
Why spend your life conforming to somebody else’s template? Your life is your own, and you should live it to the full. Find your passion and then use it to make your life better. If you truly want to achieve something, the only thing that can really stop you is a lack of determination. The International Career Institute offers a huge range of courses that can give you the skills, training and knowledge to pursue a career you really love. Browse our course list today!