You are your job….or the importance of choosing the right career
The above lines have been used beautifully in the movie “Fight Club” (one of my all-time favorites) to wake up the average Joe from his everyday slumber and break the shackles of corporate slavery. And as great and lofty it may sound, let me tell you — it’s NOT true.
As much as you and I would like to think that we are not defined by our jobs, that’s precisely what defines us. In today’s competitive world we spend more of our waking hours working our jobs than any other pursuit. As an example, an average day consists of 9 hours of work (from 9 AM — 6 PM), 2 hours of commute on an average, another 2 hours for catching up on work (in my case, offshore conference calls) — this adds upto 13 hours, and the remaining 11 hours in the day are taken up by other essential activities like personal hygiene, cooking food, doing the laundry and getting sleep. So major portion of the waking day is taken up by our jobs.
Our jobs provide us a sense of achievement and a rank in the society we live in. A very common example — when a person (known or unknown) asks you about what do you, the reply is almost always “I’m a ______ (fill the blanks with your profession)” and never is the reply like “I work as a _______”. This simple exercise clearly articulates how our jobs have become an integral part of our identities.
And honestly, we can’t really blame anybody for our approach towards a job — the competition is tougher, jobs are lesser, we are in a constant hurry to get things done, buy stuff we need, complete milestones before we are too old to do that and the list goes on and on.
Rather than vehemently refuting this stated fact, we should try and reconcile ourselves with the fact that we can choose our identities and choose jobs that we are most likely to associate ourselves with, almost similar to selecting the music we listen to based on what our personality is.
So in the end, I’d like to reiterate — we are our jobs, the jobs are our identities. So choose wisely, as the job you choose, becomes your identity and its a matter of time before you won’t be in a position to switch jobs and identities any further.
To wrap it up — “Choose wisely, Live well!”
