Three Factors to Finding the Work You Love
Certain people have always known the kind of work that they want to pursue. I am not one of those people. I have also never been someone content to separate work from life and pursue what I love in my spare time. This quest for meaningful employment is a fairly standard part of the millennial experience and has incited much anxiety and soul-searching amongst our generation — feelings with which I am quite familiar.
Yet in spite of all the stress and uncertainty that I’ve faced in deciding a fulfilling career path, I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to have worked many jobs I loved — from managing a fair-trade café to being a professional sorting hat. Each one has taught me a bit about the kind of work I want to spend my life doing and how to identify it.
That last part has been worth reflecting on in particular, since so much of my childhood was spent trying to identify a specific job title — writer, vet, teacher, etc. — as we are taught to do at school. But there are so many interesting careers out there that have no neat names, and it has become increasingly normal to switch jobs more frequently.
The work that I’ve thrived in has been so diverse that finding the common thread is near impossible. There’s practically no overlap in holing up in my bed writing and reffing sports games for groups of 50 screaming kids, but I love both equally. Do I then pursue a career in writing or education or management? Should I be working alone or with human interaction? Only recently did I begin realizing those might be the wrong questions to ask.
The common thread, at least for me, isn’t in the tasks or routine. Those can vary, and I’d still enjoy the work. The stuff that has allowed me to thrive in some workplaces over others were the three factors here:
I loved the people I was working with. It made every bit of the work fun and exciting, and with colleagues that were easy to talk to, we were so productive and creative. I wanted to show up just to hang out with them, and the office became a pleasant atmosphere that I could associate with laughter and de-stressing as well. The people you work with are part of the job — inseparable parts. There is no perfect job with the wrong people, and a less-than-ideal workplace can come to life with the right people to lead and inspire.
I wanted the stress. In May, when I was debating between two jobs, I talked to my manager and she told me, “you have to want the stress.” Immediately, I knew which stress I wanted. It’s a consistent feeling in the jobs I’ve loved most: even when everything was going to hell, I wanted to be there. I wanted to work through it and didn’t mind that it leaked into my evenings and early mornings and took up a hundred hours a week. I was eager to refresh my email, even at 10 PM.
I was growing the parts of myself that I liked the most. It’s not enough to find a job that helps you grow and makes you happy; both of those things are so difficult to define. Even with bad or boring experiences, we grow in patience and resilience, and there are different aspects of any work that can make you happy and others that don’t. What I’ve found more important to pinpoint is whether I’m growing in the areas that I love most about myself — creativity, leadership, strength, social justice advocacy. When I love what I’m doing, I love myself.
In finding work we love, we shouldn’t be restricting ourselves to specific titles or institutions, but instead try to identify interchangeable qualities and skills that can be applied across different jobs or even different industries. Of course, the prerequisite to any insight is having diverse experiences in the first place, and the motivation to try things has been my greatest strength.
I have leapt at every opportunity to do something, anything, from fostering cats to volunteering at Planned Parenthood to plugging statistics in spreadsheets. My activities and interests allow me the flexibility to spin different qualifications for jobs I apply for and to try out what works and what doesn’t. Even though that has meant miserable months of going out of my mind, it has also meant being hired right out of school with a humanities degree and working several jobs that I love. Now, even while working more hours with more challenging situations than ever before, my fear of missing out has vanished, and I feel fulfilled in how I’m spending each day.