Why a Purposeful Career?
A Snippet
People in their 20s and early 30s have many names to describe the phase of life they have the privilege to experience: “Quarter life crisis”, “self discovery”, and “the start of adulthood”. Whatever the name, we can agree this phase can be uncomfortable and confusing — it’s the time we come to know that we are not kids anymore. Changes and adaptations are inevitable in our social lives and we learn that even our closest friends will choose a way to live their lives that differs from ours. We begin to acknowledge the questions, sometimes unspeakable, that everyone has. A soft voice speaks in the back of our mind continuously, asking about what we’ve been doing all this time, asking about the future, asking about happiness, asking about relationships, asking about ourselves. This is a time where we face choices with the knowledge that each decision affects the rest of our story. If you hear that voice in the back of your mind, be grateful for two reasons: first, because it is one of the signs of growth, and second, because it leads you to a journey in finding answers.
This critical time in life comes with one of the critical choices: What career does one want to pursue? It has always been a non-stop discussion over coffee, beer, lunch, dinner, or basically anytime we want to admit how it occupies the mind of the early grown-ups. What do we know about career? We know that individuals on average work 50–62.5% of their total waking hours. We know that people often work more than 96,000 hours in their lifetime. We know for sure how that huge amounts of time can affect our happiness and health, but there is one thing we often forget — we forget that career isn’t measured in hours behind a desk. We often miss that career is more than that.
There is a difference between a job and a career that not everyone is aware of. A job can be something that is assigned to you, or you assigned to yourself so that you can get paid. A job can be defined by the job title in the hierarchy of an organization, by a list of job descriptions, or bound by a contract with a company. A job can be found in a list of openings on a website, a job fair, or any kind of open recruitment platform. This is not a career. A career is not like a meal you can choose from a list of foods in a restaurant’s menu. The right career for you can only be found within yourself — no one else will know the answers but you. A career can be something that never existed before, that you have created for yourself. A career is beyond what you are called by your bosses or subordinates. In reality it’s beyond an agreed job description, beyond the amount of time you spend in an office. Your career is what you choose to DO in life.
