Finding a career is one of the most important responsibilities that you have as an adult. A career allows you to care for yourself and those dependent on you. What’s more, careers can often give you the financial freedom to start engaging with those things you enjoy most. However, not every career is born equal. Those that are right for one person may not be a good fit for another.
Why Caring About Your Career is Important
The most important thing you need to consider when you are looking to start a career is whether or not you are going to care about what you are doing. Caring about what you’re doing is one of the most important things in any career because it has a huge impact on the way that you engage with your work and how you feel about it.
You Spend Most of Your Time Working. Day-to-day, the thing that you are going to spend the majority of your time on is your career. There are only so many hours in the day, and you have to put in a large amount of those to do your job effectively, which means you often end up with precious few hours left to spend on the things you enjoy. Nobody, alive or dead, could enjoy spending so much of their time on something they care so little about, and when you are spending so much of your time working, it is vital that you enjoy it.
Boredom Can Be Genuinely Dangerous. The most fundamentally important reason as to why you need to enjoy your job is that boredom can be so incredibly dangerous. As a species, people would often rather enjoy incredible pain than continue in a state of boredom. In fact, too much boredom in your workplace can result in a bit of a health phenomenon similar to burnout called boreout. This can cause a lot of similar health issues to burnout, and it’s one of the strongest arguments for why you need to enjoy your work.
Passion is the Key to Joy. So if you’re looking to circumvent this boredom by spending your time working in a field that excites and invigorates you, you’re going to want to look for something that invokes passion. When you are doing something that you feel passionate about, that is the most effective way to feel happy with what you are doing and often the best way to know if something is right for you.
How to Find a Career that Excites You
So if you’ve made the decision to try and avoid the boredom of a traditional workplace, then there are plenty of things that you can do to help find a career that will excite you. This process starts with asking yourself a few questions.
What Do You Enjoy? Spend a little time identifying all the things that you really enjoy doing. It doesn’t matter if these are things that you think could potentially become a job or not. Just write down things that you love. You can use these to help yourself figure out what invokes passion and what you want to do when given a choice.
What are You Good at? Next, spend a little time really considering your skills and figuring out what you are personally good at. It’s important to be as honest as possible with yourself here. Being too humble or too arrogant could be equally harmful.
What Would People Be Willing to Pay For? Lastly, take some time and figure out what exactly you think people would be willing to pay for. There are plenty of industries that seem odd to other people, but not everything can be sold, so it’s important that you do a little research and figure out what people are willing to pay for.
If you take all three of these questions and you find a single point where they intersect, that is going to be the most exciting job that you can do at the moment. In fact, at the moment is an important term because what excites you today may not be what excites you a year from now. Keep asking yourself these questions, and if the answer is no longer what you’re doing, think about how you might make a change.
How Education Can Help You
Education is a brilliant tool that you can turn to your advantage in finding a career that makes you happy. After all, the more you know about an industry, the more effectively you are going to be able to work in it.
Build Your Skills. Employers want skilled workers because those are the people that are going to be most valuable to their businesses. Plus, hiring a worker that is already skilled means that you have to spend less money training them. Most business decisions are made on the basis of cost versus benefit, and effective education is one of your best tools for tipping that scale in your favor.
Helps to Create Demonstrable Work Ethic. Another benefit of education when you’re applying for jobs is that it is a brilliant way to prove that you have a good work ethic. It’s easy for anyone to say that they can work well under pressure, but it’s harder for most to back that up with evidence. Education can help you do just that.
Provides the Space to Explore. If you aren’t necessarily sure what career you’re interested in, but you know what you want to learn, education can give you a Safe space to explore what you enjoy and what you don’t. So if you find yourself enjoying an online criminology course, then you might want to consider going into that industry.
Thinking Outside of the Box
Finally, one last thing you might want to do when you’re trying to figure out how exactly you want to be working is to think outside of the box. There are plenty of very traditional careers that might bring you plenty of joy. However, if none do, you might want to consider how some less traditional careers might work for you: things like starting your own business, working as a freelancer, or even approaching a blend of traditional and nontraditional working. If you find a way to work that allows you to support yourself and your passions, that is always going to be the best thing that you can do.