Inching Towards Ideal: What is My Dream Job Anyway?
If you google ‘dream job’ there are about 989,000,000 results.
That means that a lot of people have a lot of opinions on what a dream job is, or how to attain it.
On Buzzfeed alone you can find out what your dream job is by looking intently at your favorite colors, personalizing a jean jacket, or building a Disney-themed feast. I’m a writer, animal breeder, and an interior designer if you’re wondering.
Lately I’ve been thinking about this idea since I was let go of my job a few weeks ago. Friends and now former colleagues would try to show me the silver lining responding, “well now you can focus on your dream job.”
I appreciate the sentiment, but the fact of the matter was I really enjoyed this job, and I wasn’t quite ready to move on to the next opportunity. A friend told me to assess if you should leave a job if you’ve decided you’ve learned all from that opportunity, which is sage advice.
So how did my last job rank? Well, I checked all the boxes on what Business Insider says are five ways you know you found your dream job.
- I excelled, and was growing from what was thrown at me — even including ‘failures’
- While it wasn’t the best part, I didn’t even mind the grunt work
- It fit my personality, and even started boosting my self-confidence
- I adored my colleagues
- I even look forward to Mondays
One of the reasons having to leave this job hurt so much was I was actively building a job description I didn’t even think I was capable of. I used to tell people what I did and cap it off with the joke―“I’m just living my best millennial life.” I was only half joking.
If we’re being completely honestly, the last time I thought about a dream job was when I was a kid. To young Julia it was totally reasonable to become a Marine-Biologist-Dolphin-Trainer and Chef that collected rocks on weekends. As I’m calculating my next career move, I realized I’ve been kinda short-changing myself from the start―and I bet I’m hardly the only one. In high school I decided to be an art major simply because I was good at it, knowing I didn’t have the push and passion and drive to be a full time artist. Throughout college I constantly attempted to search for a way to make this degree worth it. How could we turn this jumble of knowledge and skills into something practical.
“Practical”
Most of my ‘career setbacks’ can probably be rooted back to this idea that we have to be practical. For those that like metaphors―I’d aim for silver not gold, to feel comfortable, desperately afraid of not only failure but success. Many experience this every time they get a “so what are you going to do with that” or “do you have a back-up plan” -esque comment.
As a proud jack-of-all-trades, it took a ton of effort to start thinking less about what the title of my job should be and look at what kind of job I wanted. What consistently proactively compromising for practicality looks like is tending to follow the back-up plan subconsciously not your dream.
Leaving my last job hurt because I was finally admitting I was finally achieving things I told myself for years I couldn’t do―write, speak, travel, etc. I think we compromise like this all the time in the museum world thinking that we want to be educators, curators, or whatever title and not what the full breadth of what we can be as an asset to an institution, or even what those roles look like. Do educators mostly work with kids an families? Are archivists always tucked away behind the scenes?
It might be time for us as a museum community to look at our traditional job roles and think about what is the best structure and organization to fulfill our mission effectively, or get our public to fall in love with our space. By re-assessing our roles we update with changing tech, a changing landscape, and get ahead of a field that is desperately looking to stay relevant.
So in a way, my friends are right. It is the best time to reflect, dig in and answer the question what is my dream job? Maybe it’s time to appease rock-collecting-marine-biologist-dolphin-trainer-and-chef Julia by diving deep into soul searching to answer that question, and shoot for gold this time around.
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This article first appeared on jskennedy.net on 6/21/2018.
