Finding the job we love

Lead image

For many of us, the most powerful and vagus desire is to be more creative. When we consider what it means to be creative, we are confronted with a very limited set of options. We may be aesthetically creative, and hence decide to pursue careers as painters, photographers, filmmakers, designers, or architects. We may be intellectually curious and aspire to be novelists, journalists, or academics. We think we're musically talented, thus we'd like to form a band. Alternatively, we may be sensibly innovative and desire to open a restaurant.

The difficulty is that, statistically speaking, getting any of these occupations is nearly impossible. We can become stuck, knowing exactly what we want to do yet unable to break into our chosen sector. We end up with a fixation, rather than just an interest, to convey a combination of inner certainty and exterior impossibility.

The solution to such fixations is to learn more about what we are truly creatively interested in, because the more precisely and precisely we understand what we truly care about, the more likely we are to discover that our creative interests and associated pleasures exist in a far broader range of occupations than we have previously entertained.

It's a lack of awareness of what we're truly looking for - and thus a fairly typical and clear reading of the job market - that forces us into a much smaller tunnel of alternatives than is necessary. When we fully comprehend what draws us to one type of creative work, we are better equipped to see qualities that are present in other types of work.

What we really like is a collection of themes we first discovered there, usually because this job was the most visible example of a repository of them - which is where the problem began, because overly visible jobs tend to attract too much attention, become oversubscribed, and then can only offer very low pay. However, the qualities can't exist solely there in actuality. They must be general, and will be available under other, less evident guises once we figure out where to search.

Consider someone who has made a significant investment in the goal of becoming a journalist. The term "journalist" has become a prized badge that encapsulates all they desire. The work conjured up images of glamour and stimulation, as well as excitement and dynamism, from an early age. Parents, uncles, and aunts became accustomed to referring to them as future journalists. However, the sector is presently in terminal decline and is egregiously oversubscribed. The outcome is a block and a lot of angst.

The suggested course of action is to take a break from the unproductive job search and unpaid internships and consider what might actually appeal to one's innate joy about becoming a journalist. What are the true pleasures that one seeks here, and do they exist elsewhere and in a more suitable work environment?

We're prone to a lot of natural ambiguity around here. Often, we are only interested in the broad sound of a job. However, if we consider the joys involved, we begin to pry up the lid and examine the contents more closely. When we examine journalism more closely, we discover that it provides some of the following benefits: the capacity to deal with major political and social topics, analyze policy, write elegantly, and be acknowledged for one's critical abilities. When such components are defined, it becomes evident that they cannot be solely linked to the journalistic industry.

The combination cannot and should not be limited to newspapers and magazines. It isn't truly related to any one industry. The characteristics can and do appear in a variety of other areas. For example, a financial investment firm may have a significant need to analyze emerging markets and explain their potential as well as potential weaknesses to clients; a university may have a significant need to analyze and understand changes in its competitive environment and communicate these to its staff in clear and compelling ways; and an oil company may have a significant need to analyze future likely employment needs and communicate this to its employees. These industries are not classified as journalism, yet they nonetheless have demands and opportunities that provide the same joys that were once, albeit superficially, associated with journalism.

The pleasures we seek are more movable than we previously thought, according to research. They don't have to be sought solely in the sphere of, say, the media; they can be pursued in a variety of sectors of the economy and be more accessible, secure, and financially lucrative.

This isn't a game designed to make us give up on what we genuinely want. The freeing move is to realize that what we seek can be found in locations other than the ones we've previously defined. The same analysis might be used for education. It turns out that this does not have to be done in a primary or secondary school; in essence, one might be a teacher in an aeronautics corporation or a wealth management organization. Alternatively, someone hooked on politics may discover that the joys they seek can be found just as easily working for a tourist board or an oil exploration business.

This may appear to be decent, but only if we don't fully comprehend what we're looking for. The surprise, liberating aspect of assessing your job hunt by the joys you seek is that it indicates that obtaining a job we enjoy is never dependent on a certain industry area. Because, when properly understood, a creative pleasure is - luckily - generic, it might appear in a variety of previously unanticipated areas.

We can love more widely if we have a thorough understanding of what we love.