2)Match your passion to your job.
3)Immediately love your life. There is a Christian variation on this teaching that has always made me feel rather guilty and inadequate as a believer. 1)Find God’s perfect will for your life.
2)Follow God’s will to your perfect job.
3)Immediately love your life. However, that is not the way I have actually lived my life. Nobody ever seemed willing to pay me to pursue my passions or God’s perfect will for my life. After working in American factories for nine years, I looked around and made the following decisions. Working as the night superintendent at a saw chain factory was not any kind of life that a sane person might want to live. I liked machines and machines liked me. Working as a mechanical engineer in a Government research center seemed like a pretty good way to earn a decent living. After watching layoffs and factory closings the security offered by a Government job seemed like a pretty good idea. I went back to school, earned my engineering degree, got my job, and (as they say) the rest is history. There is a price to pay for not following your dreams and passions. Somehow I feel as though I have done a pretty good job of living someone else’s life. On the other hand a stable, secure, interesting job has allowed me to be a faithful, though certainly not perfect husband and employee these many years. In fact, I followed the alternative advice offered by Ramit Sethi in “Follow Your Passion is Bad Advice. Do this instead.” 1)Identify a Target Lifestyle (not a target job)--How much money do you need to live the life you want to live? My wife and I wanted to live a comfortable middle to upper middle class lifestyle. 2)Find a Supporting Job Amongst Many Such Jobs--Being a 20th Century industrial man, my mind was pretty limited to opportunities in major manufacturing corporations or the Federal Government. That is where I did my job search. 3)Train a Rare and Valuable Skill--Once I found my job, I worked to improve my skills as project manager, as the branch expert on industrial processes, and in the area of contract management. 4)Leverage Your Value to Move Towards Target Lifestyle--Well I have paid off the mortgage, enjoyed vacations in Hawaii and such places, paid cash for new cars, and now it looks like I will be able to retire with some measure of comfort and dignity. Guess it worked. The author believes achieving mastery in your career will lead to passion. He states that, “Feeling passion for your work is a great goal, but identifying a passion in advance, and then matching it to a job, is not a consistently replicable way of achieving this goal. The better strategy is to work backward from a target lifestyle, pick a supporting job, cultivate a skill, then leverage your value. If you study people who really do love their careers, you’ll find that most used some variation of this strategy as the foundation for their happiness.” As I have said before, it has been over 27 years since I did the job search thing. My knowledge and experience in this critical area is out of date. From my research Ramit Sethi’s blog, I Will Make You Rich, seems to have the best variety of practical tips to find a job, at least on the websites I have explored. He is young, urban, and edgy. At times some of my more genteel readers might find him a bit offensive, but I think if you are looking for a job or know someone who is looking for a job, he is well worth your time. Read the original and watch the video
Follow Your Passion is Bad Advice by Ramit Sethi
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