The unicorn dream job
This rant is partly the outcome of learning gained by pursuing the “dream job”. I am writing it down for my own sake and whoever might be recovering from a disappointment in “pursuing dreams” and are trying to piece their life together to try again.
The fallacy originates from trying to have a singular purpose to satisfy multiple facets. When I used to think about my life purpose, I always tried to find the “One Job” that will satisfy me as not just a source of income, but also a source of fulfillment while also being something that I already invested a lot of energy in becoming good at. To put it visually, it looks something like this:
I love programming. And I am really good at some types of programming because I spent a good deal of my life honing the craft. But I hate my job as a software developer. The reason for it, and the reality for most people who tried this path is this — What you get paid to do involves doing things that are NOT entirely in the sphere of “What I love” nor in “What I am good at”.
While trying to find the right intersection of the three, there results a terrible short-sight of the empty space in the three regions. By trying to fit more and more into every area, we only end up taking a sliver of each. This of course, is not true of all cases. If the job you like and what you have been trained to do pays well then there will be a larger area of overlap. Anyway, for me at least, this culminated in a tendency to bargain by saying “Hey okay. So the thing I love to do doesn’t pay well. I will accept a modest wage to be able to work on something I want” — or some similar excuse.
I accepted the situation and tried to bargain my dream job to include more aspects of what I love to do. I was a web applications developer for several years. I thought I could leverage the software engineering experience to get a job in game development because I like creating visual things, I like programming and it is software engineering in one way. But the problem was that it wasn’t something I was good at.
By trying to satisfy more of the other, it ends up limiting the opportunities to a very narrow space. What I am getting at here is to try to not mix the different criteria in order to prematurely define what the dream job is going to look like. It is a fashion to quit the job to find a “purpose” that we read about and try to imagine how fulfilling a life it would be, risking disappointment two-fold because if it doesn’t pan out the way we imagine, then we are left with trying to retrace the steps but also wandering in meaninglessness because the “purposeful” job did not turn out to be what was expected.
An alternative way of thinking perhaps (and this is yet to be field tested) is to separate finance and fulfillment. The job could be a source of income but we need not be attached to it for “purpose”. By managing our time effectively, we can spend some effort in improving the activity we love to do.
This way, there is no need to narrow my dream job to fit all the aspects that I want it to fulfill. By separating the activities that we love to do from the job, it leaves focus on mastering the things that are needed to fulfill the job.Mastery is expansive by nature. By focusing on skill required for both, there is a possibility of expansion to encompass more of each zone and maybe over a period of time, armed with knowledge, experience and perhaps capital, we could reach the dream job — not as the result of an isolated decision but as the result of consistent progression.
