Self-awareness is truly the key

When I’m searching for a job, which I have been, it truly is utter madness out there in the job market. The employer wants to have the perfect candidate in the Netherlands.

Let me tell you, the perfect candidate does not exists, what does exists is someone who is ‘capable’ and ‘motivated’. Even those two characteristics come in certain degrees. Nowadays you need to have an entrepreneurial spirit and you need to be highly analytical and all that stuff. The thing is most of us are students, not practitioners, maybe a few are. Loads of people just enjoyed the theory and haven’t done anything. I’m not blaming us as students coming from college/university. I’m confused about the level of understanding from the industry. They know that society is not fair to most students. You need to pay your classes, you enter a student society for fun and the social connections (which is very important), then you need to pay rent and IF you are lucky you have some reserve budget for when all hell breaks loose.

So tell me where in that scenario are you suppose to have a pre-career? Look some people know it from the start what they want and others just have a high IQ which enables them to cruise through college life-like it is nothing. I had about 3 people in my social circle who came pretty close to that picture of cruising through college life. Then again, they were bored out of their minds most of the time and partied a lot, because college didn’t really challenge them. Then you have the other half which I kind of belong to. I’m dyslexic but I could handle that, so I needed far more time than anybody else to study, please do not pity me. Because it actually gave me an enormous advantage, I learned very quickly to assess/understand myself, which did not come within a week or so. No, it took me YEARS because school life and college life were so tough on me and I kind of had to go from my parents. During these years I really tried loads of different stuff, in the end I knew what it was I liked. It were multiple things but closely related in some way.

So self-awareness, for some of us a funny term others think it is overrated, I actually think is the sauce that makes you happy and succesful in life in the end. The self-awareness enables you to double/triple down on your strengths, look at michael phelps an all time olympian he discovered early on he had/ was good at swimming and doubled down on that and he is happy and succesful because he has a talent for it. I can mention many more names but I think happiness comes from self-awareness and succesfulness comes from a talent you posses. Some things just come more natural to you.

So when I’m looking for a job is has to fit but sometimes you just need the job for the money, which is perfectly understandable, we all have bills to pay. Just ask yourself this question, could you go 2 or 3 hours earlier to your present job?