Nice Work If You Can Get it

Dream Jobs and Can We Find Them?

Many have quested for the holy grail of jobs, or at least spent time imagining what that job might be. You know the one; the job that allows a good work-life balance so we don’t forget what our friends and family look like. It pays well enough that we can live the lifestyle we want without slowly killing ourselves. It’s not boring but it’s not stressful either and we don’t take it home with us. Oh, and it’s meaningful. It satiates that yearning in our soul and gives rainbows and butterflies to the world. That job. Have you seen it advertised anywhere?

Photo by Aimée Gramblin on Unsplash

Who Likes Their Job Anyway?

For many people work ‘pay the bills’. There’s comfort in the work routine and they could always be doing worse things (like watching paint dry…take it up with Dulux). Others loathe their jobs and are constantly imagining how they’ll escape the daily grind and retire to sunnier climes. Some are perpetually stressed out, doing more than can reasonably be expected for sustained periods in the name of doing a good job.

I’ve met a handful of people who love their jobs. Talking to such people about their work is mesmerising. They’re animated, lit from the inside and shining out. They tell work stories that might be mundane coming from a person who’s plodding along, but when told from their perspective it’s an epic hero’s journey with twists and turns, the words basking in the glow of the joy they find in their work. Other people give them the side-eye, wondering if they might find such satisfaction if they retrained to become a ‘insert dream job here.’

How do I Find That Job?

I wish I could tell you. The truth is, it’s complicated. But pondering the how has raised some interesting questions. For instance, should we ‘do what we love’ and hope it pays off, as social media seems so fond of telling us? It’s a good theory, probably works for some, won’t work for all. I think the problem here is with the relentless call to perfection we see on social media (even the ‘I’m not perfect’ posts embody perfection, what a head wrecker).

Remember hobbies? Those things people did in their spare time just for the fun of it, with no expectation to turn it into a side-hustle that’ll buy you a private yacht and enough money for mooring fees in the Bahamas? I’d like to bring those back please. I think many people used to find satisfaction in their hobbies, but who’s got the time nowadays? And if you’ve got the time, where did you get all that spare time? Shouldn’t you be using it to make some money?

Is a job we don’t bring home even possible? Not for the millions who work from home. I guess what we’re really saying here is we want a job we don’t have to think about outside office hours. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

I was talking to a person of an older generation the other day (don’t ask me which one, I’m old enough to be of a generation that remembers when we didn’t have names for generations, so naturally I can’t remember) but suffice to say they were old enough to have been retired for some time. They told me that when they worked, work wasn’t considered separate from life but part of it. To them, trying to separate work life and life was a losing battle. It was always a balancing act. Sometimes you had to put the extra hours in, sometimes you went on holiday to Majorca so your kids realised they still had two parents and you didn’t develop a gastric ulcer. Work was part of the ebb and flow of life. That’s given me something to chew on (aside from the Gaviscon).

Impossibly High Standards

Which brings me to our expectations for our jobs. When I was growing up, a good job was generally considered to be one that paid well. Nowadays, there’s an expectation that not only do we need a job that pays well, but it must sound interesting when we talk about it to other people, have a meaningful impact on the world and it would help if it could fulfil our soul-purpose and bring us untold joy each and every day, preferably accompanied by Instagram snappable moments that we can use to convey our joy to the world.

What we don’t see behind all the self-starter, ‘I found my calling and made it my side-hustle now I’m a globe-trotting digital-nomad entrepreneur’ Instagram snappable moments, is all the mundane and stressful periods that go into creating a sustainably successful business. There’s plenty of people who create hyped-up products with viral marketing that are successful in the short term but quickly become obsolete (anyone seen those bins full of reduced price Prime cans at their local supermarket?) but it takes a lot of time doing things we’d rather not to be successful at anything.

Mark Manson says you need to decide what flavour of shit sandwich you want to eat, because ‘everything sucks some of the time,’ including the things we love. Take writing this article, for example. I’ve been at it for 3.5 hours so far, minus a couple of procrastinating tea breaks (followed by essential loo breaks) and minutes wasted thanks to the inexplicable urge to check my news feed for the tenth time today in case anything’s new (it isn’t).

The truth is, we can’t expect a job to provide a magical bullet to a fulfilling life; it’s too much to ask of it. There are people who have jobs they love, but I seriously doubt if they love every aspect of them. It’s more likely they’ve chosen their flavour of shit sandwich and it works for them.

Photo by Pixzolo Photography on Unsplash

Know Thyself

I think the key to finding a job that we’re mostly happy with starts with knowing ourselves and what matters to us. I often indulge in life-would-be-better-if-only fantasies (they’re my favourite kind) and on the job front it usually involves me having a job title that sounds nice and impressive to other people and has an inspirational impact . But when I think about the job I do have (the title of which is likely to make people glaze over) I find the myriad ways in which it suits me.

Being with those I love lights me up and it just so happens I work for my family business. This gives me plenty of opportunities to talk and spend time with some of my closest family, and I value this. I work in a supportive role which allows me plenty of time to spend with my children while still contributing to the successful running of the business, both of which feel good. I enjoy the interaction with customers and colleagues and I’m always aiming to keep things friendly and positive (not easy when your primary function is chasing people for money). The days when I can make someone smile are usually my best. My job leaves me time to indulge my hobby of writing, without which you wouldn’t have the pleasure of my weekly wittering.

The shit-sandwich of my job is that it involves numbers (my nemesis) but the longer I do it the less scary those numbers have become, and the development of skills in an area I considered myself less than proficient has done wonders for my personal sense of capability.

It's All in The Story

Notice anything about the last couple of paragraphs? It’s my own personal story of how my job fits with my values and my life. The stories we tell ourselves about the jobs we do are perhaps one of the most important factors in job satisfaction.

University Professors Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski interviewed hospital cleaners and found those that were most satisfied by their work were the ones that crafted the job into something meaningful to them. They chatted to patients and visitors, some made a point of asking about allergies so they could make sure the products they used wouldn’t irritate, others noticed if a patient was on their own and made a point of checking in on them throughout the day. They made their job relational, and the meaning and fulfilment they found in their job came from them. It was the same work as those who were less satisfied with their roles, but they approached it in a different way. Wrzesniewski calls this ‘job crafting.’

Of course there are some jobs that no amount of crafting can mould into something we enjoy. Sometimes it’s simply time to move on. It’s up to us to know ourselves well enough to know what we need from a job, and some of that may involve a certain amount of ‘job crafting’ on our part, because no job is perfect.

Or maybe we should learn a lesson from Anne Wallace-Hadrill and Josie Church. These two neighbours from Oxford are about to turn one hundred and one, their advice?

“Get on with life and don’t overthink it. We don’t engineer our lives. I think they’ve just engineered us.”

(Joseph Walshe/SWNS)

In the spirit of getting on with things and inspired by some wonderful whimsy over on Wells of Goodness earlier this week (thank you Mel), I shall leave you with a rhyme that I have tried hard not to overthink.

Dream Job

I got a job as a pusher on the Tokyo express
But I found I was more of a puller
Which got me in quite a mess
So I went into selling mushrooms
Man, that was quite a trip
But I quit when the golden monkey
Demanded that I strip
I went into fluffing pandas
Those bears are as cute as they look
I got fired for taking one home
Which definitely sucked
But it led me to my dream job
This one's as cushty as can be
I get paid just for sleeping
I dream, professionally

Photo by Rehina Sultanova on Unsplash

Inspired by a google of world’s weirdest jobs, which included a train pusher, a panda fluffer and a professional sleeper. I don’t know where the mushrooms came from, just curious I guess.

Do not seek perfection in a changing world.

-Gautama Buddha