We tend to stumble along in life like it’s something that just happens to us, instead of steering it in the right direction. Then we wonder how we ended up in a fluorescent-lit office, working long hours and never able to watch our kids playing sport or take the time to look after ourselves. It’s important to think about your passion and attaining the lifestyle that will nurture your – and your family’s – happiness.
Follow your passion – with a mission!
Don’t choose money over passion. Some people pinpoint careers or jobs that they think will earn them big bucks without considering whether they’ll get any job satisfaction. Which is why you’ll often find people chained to their desks in finance or IT when they’d rather be in a job that has them on the move or in different environments.
But, says life coach Jessica Sweet, “following your passion” can be a hazardous path to choose. “I’ve seen it happen again and again. Clients get excited about their idea for a passion-based business. They start making plans, they mentally decorate their new offices and they wonder how their boss is going to take it when they’ve made enough money to quit. And they do all this without taking into account the biggest myth.”
“When it comes to earning money doing what you love, you have to remember: Right now, nobody cares about your passions.”Sweet says that it should first be about your clients and customers: Ask yourself what you can give them and how they will benefit from what you offer. “You have to make them care about your passion so much that they’ll pay you to do it.” In other words, why should others care as much about your passion as you do?
Choose your dream lifestyle
Have you ever really stopped to think what you’d like your life to look like in the future. If you could, how would you choose to live?
Author of several books, including So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University in the USA, Cal Newport, offers up unconventional advice. He says: “Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.” He believes that following your passion won’t “necessarily direct you to a life that you’re happy to live”. So he advises that you find the right job to suit the lifestyle you want. If you don’t want to work long hours, a job in a deadline-pressurised newsroom is probably not for you.
If you want to live a bohemian existence with lots of travelling, you might want to think about becoming a travel writer. Obviously these choices have to marry with your existing skills. So if you’re opting for a career change, consider the lifestyle you’re seeking and weigh up whether your new career path fulfils this.
Newport defines lifestyle as “a detailed feel for what your day-to-day existence would be like”. He says you should consider the following questions when you’re imagining your ideal lifestyle:
- How much control do I have over my schedule?
- What’s the intensity level of my job?
- What’s the importance of what I do?
- What’s the prestige level?
- What type of work is it?
- Where do I live?
- What’s my social life like?
- What’s my work-life balance like?
- What’s my family like?
- How do other people see me?
- What am I known for?
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