How to Find Work You Truly Love
When it comes to finding work that you love, there’s really two sides to the coin. It’s a lot more complicated than people think. You often hear that if you find a job you love you’ll never work a day in your life, but also that if you do something you love for a living you’ll stop loving it.
What you really need to find is some sort of balance. You can love your work even if it’s not your absolute favourite thing in the world to do. It’s important to be happy in your job, but it’s still a job at the end of the day and it has to be a good source of income too.
The job that you love might not be something you’ve even thought about doing before. Here’s a few things you can do to help find work that you’ll enjoy.
- Find Your Passions
Passion is a funny thing, because it doesn’t always translate into any kind of tangible ability that can be useful in a workplace. You could be very passionate about music but that alone is not going to make you a talented musician. And in the world of music right now, very few people can actually make a living. Even some people with all the talent in the world won’t see much success.
But passion is still important for finding work. It plays a crucial role because the things you care about can point you in the right direction. Think about what drives you when you’re not working. The things you like to fill your free time with. These are your true passions.
What is it about them that interests you? Why do you want to dedicate time to them? If you can answer these questions and discover the source of your passion, you can look for it elsewhere.
Try and find passion in your work, instead of actually trying to find work in your passion. It won’t be easy but it is possible. You can try and find a job where the stuff you’ll be doing gives you the same feeling that you get during your free time when you’re doing something you love. Keep a journal of how your activities outside of work make you feel and what you enjoy most about these activities. Then you can start researching available jobs and which ones will offer work that is similar to these activities.
- Build a Skill Set
So as I said in the last point, I mentioned that a job you love might not necessarily be something you’re passionate about, but something that you can find your passion in. If you’ve found a job like this, the chances are it will be something that you love doing for the most part but it’s also not what you imagined.
The key to success, is to be really, really good at something. If you really excel at something then it will eventually become effortless. If you have no trouble doing the work that you’re supposed to be doing, then you will enjoy it more. Let’s say you find work as an engineer in the oil and gas industry because you’re passionate about technology and how technology is advancing. This would be an industry that is changing because of advancing technology and so you would be dealing with it quite a bit.
So the job would be a place where you can follow your passion, but at the same time, engineering is tough. And the manual labour and data analysis parts of it might not be something that you enjoy all that much on account of how taxing and difficult it all is. But this is not much of a problem if you’re excellent at it. So what you need to do is practice. A lot.
Don’t stop practicing until you are so good at what you do that you don’t even realize you are doing it. You do this, and you can focus pretty much entirely on your passions at work while getting through the other stuff with ease.
- Always Have Perspective
At the end of the day, if you actually have a job that you can make a living off, you are already doing better than a lot of people. Even if you hate your job, the fact that you would have the luxury to go home at the end of the day and take some time to do something you love is more than a lot of people can say.
So if you follow these steps and actually find a job that not only you are making a living from, but that you also enjoy, then you’re one of the luckiest people around. Even if your job isn’t perfect, if you always keep this in mind and take the time to appreciate the results of your hard work, you’ll be happier.
A comfortable, fun and well-paying job is an achievement worth celebrating. Have a bit of perspective on what your life could be like and you’ll find yourself feeling proud and content.
Conclusion
For most of us, life isn’t going to go exactly as we’ve been planning it out since we were teenagers, but that’s okay. You can be happy without perfection. The best course of action is to work hard, and to make the best of your circumstances. Like anything else, finding enjoyment takes effort. And if you’re willing to put that effort in, you’ll see the results.