Make a career following your heart’s choice; and not by the echo of society’s voice
Millions of people exist, who are financially sound but still aren’t satisfied with their life. When asked as to what do they want in life, the answer to it is mostly, ‘happiness’. Happiness is such a ubiquitous term and frankly speaking there won’t be any individual who would say that ‘I want to be sad’. Everybody wants to be happy, depending on their life’s minimum expectations. Who wouldn’t want a satisfying salary, a loving family, a house, a car, and a couple of vacations in a year? The reality strikes when one learns to accept that life is a see-saw with ups and downs. There will be days when we’ll be full of enthusiasm and there will be days when we will be down. The bigger question, which we should ask ourselves is, ‘What are the things in our life that we are willing to struggle for?’ A very important part of this phrase is choosing the right career: the one that is good for our mental and physical health and not the one that is good for society’s reputation.
Categorizing the types
There are 4 types of people when it comes to choosing a career:
· First, the ones who have a clear vision of what they want to be in their life and plan it accordingly step by step, analyzing the correct path.
· Second, the ones who are not bothered by any particular career, as their main aim is to get a safe and decent job that would give them a healthy salary, be it whatever.
· Third, the ones who know their passion but are afraid to pursue it. They are somehow afraid of the fact that it is a non-conventional career for which they have to struggle a lot and what would society say if they go for it. Hence, they opt for safe routes, which often leads to frustration in the long run.
· Fourth, the ones who are clueless about what they want to do in their life. They are the ones who just follow the crowd or the internet's current trending ‘buzzwords’.
De-mystifying the sections of personalities
The first category is the ones who are clear with their goals. They assess the market situation with their own goals, check the available resources, research the possibilities, analyze the paths, and create their own customized path to move ahead. Let’s assume we have with us Toby, who wants to make a career in the sound industry and eventually open his own sound studio. Toby knows that such a career is not going to be an easy path considering the lack of opportunities, and the huge investment accompanied by a lot of struggle to get a breakthrough. But guess what, Toby has assessed his situation and he is firm on his goals and he has worked out a smart plan for himself irrespective of what happens on the journey. He knows that no career is easy unless effort, determination, and hard work are put into it. Toby has planned to do Electrical Engineering taking up relevant courses that would help him do some audio-related projects. He intends to work hard and network to get an internship relevant to the same field. He has decided that he would pursue a specialized master's degree now to go closer to his dreams. Considering his efforts pays off, he wants to go for his master's in Audio/Sound Engineering from another country where such programs are being taught and where more chances are available to gain industrial experience. Toby has planned to do get some relevant industry exposure through internships and work experience. Let us go to the future where Toby has now got most of his work done through his studies and some relevant experience. Now he goes back to his native country securing a relevant audio industry job and he starts networking as well as planning and designing for his own music studio setup. After a few years, he has his own sound studio. Ok now, this imaginative story sounds too easy, right? But no, it isn’t, as nothing comes easy unless proper systematic effort is put into it. Skipping his struggle story aside, Toby ultimately achieved this feat.
The second category is the chilled out people, who do not have any particular career goal other than a healthy salary as per their needs, a secured job (preferably a government one), and a sufficient number of yearly holidays. They focus more on enjoying personal life with family and friends. It’s ok not having a particular career goal when all we need is to be satisfied in other aspects of our life. Here let’s meet Fraser, who’s a happy-go-lucky guy. He just wants a career in a government sector preferably a government bank, but anywhere would do honestly. Fraser isn’t concerned about any particular career of choice but only wants a secure job where he would get enough money to buy a car (not a fancy one) and travel nearby once a month and have 2–3 long trips in a year. He enjoys his weekends playing console games in his X-box or watching movies with his friends or hanging out in the pub with a couple of beers cheering his favorite football team. Fraser also faces problems in his office sometimes (now who doesn’t) and also develops occasional frustrations, but he knows to leave behind his tensions while leaving the office premises. Is Fraser wrong about not having a particular choice about his career field? Absolutely not. He is doing great and he is pleased with the decisions he has taken in his life.
Now let’s come to the third category who are mostly bound to three kinds of fate in their career. Let’s meet Prat, Kim, and Lester who wanted to make a career in Computer Science, Mechanical and Digital Arts respectively. But all of them had to settle in for whatever they got or were mentally forced to take, considering the safe options.
· Prat took ‘mechanical’ in a reputed college because he wasn’t getting computer science in somewhere decent. He was struggling to cope up with mechanical and started exploring different topics and while doing so he got his ‘Eureka!’ moment one day. Prat got interested in the field of ‘marketing’ and he started learning from different topics, articles, papers, video tutorials, etc. But wait! he is from a mechanical background and how is he supposed to get into marketing? He knew that it is difficult to get into a marketing field without a management education background. He enriched himself with the knowledge, strategies, and skills required to give him a shot for a career in the field of marketing. He started doing internships, programs, and volunteering whatever he could get, small or midsized, in order to take those baby steps forward. Now when he has grown his passion in the field of Marketing he was feeling confident but still, he had to finish his undergraduate and pass the exams. He was determined to get into the field of marketing and he just passed the exams with decent marks for the sake of getting the degree. Prat’s hard work paid off and organizations recognized his passion through his efforts, remarkable achievements, and developed skills, and Prat is now a successful marketing official. Now Prat finally plans to get an MBA to enhance his knowledge. Not bad, eh?
· Kim took computer science due to family pressure. She was studious, she took student loans, and she passed the exams with flying colors. She wanted to be in the field of Mechanical engineering but lack of support from her family, her family's economic conditions as well as her own self-confidence didn’t take her side. She got a job in the IT Services sector and she has settled in well doing the 9-to-6 job. She must have killed her dreams on her journey, but she’s doing fine. Not necessarily Kim is to be blamed because she didn’t get enough support which in turn lowered her lack of confidence towards her passion. Maybe she settled for a safe career where she was more likely to get a job considering her family’s economic conditions as well as the number of opportunities in the field.
· Lester was a creative guy and loved arts. When he came to the climax of choosing his career, he only could hear the echo of the society, “Take Computer Science or Electronics, as it’s a more conventional career and there’s a lot of opportunities. You won’t get paid much in an art career and you have to struggle a lot”. Lester was confused, afraid and hence took up electronics. He cried for freedom inside and wanted to run away but couldn’t. After passing undergraduate, he started hearing a different version of the same echo from the society, “Get an MBA degree, as there’s a lot of scopes and huge salary. Electronics jobs are scarce and you will have to struggle”. But Lester is a confused and afraid person, right? He took GMAT and racked up with a good college and got his MBA and congrats Lester is now a management guy. He does a 9-to-8 job, also works on weekends out of records, earns a handsome salary, is a lovable employee, owns a car and an apartment, but still doesn’t know why is he doing this job. The artist inside him still screams inside but he still doesn’t have the courage to break the barriers, because ‘what will society say?’
We arrive now at the fourth and final category, where the person doesn’t know what to do in a career. He/she is just a person who keeps on joining different versions of a very famous deceiving queue called ‘scope’. He keeps on changing queues amidst the crowd until he gets confused and gets lost in the crowd. “What would I do for passion, if I were a millionaire or billionaire?”- How often do we ask this question to ourselves when we are baffled in our minds to choose a career? Everyone has their own strengths: Some find it soon and some find it late. There are plenty of people who just follow the crowd, knowing nothing much about the field, just because the field is currently booming and has earned the hype on the internet. Some learn, develop interest, and succeed; the rest of them fail miserably. Now the question arises — how to find the right career worth struggling for? Some points to look into for choosing the right career are:
· We should assess our strengths and interests to get a clue on, what brings us happiness.
· If the above doesn’t help, we can take the help of a counselor, which is an effective method.
· We should start to make a curated list of those things and search the internet for articles to give ourselves head-start guidance. Post that we need to explore the topics to trim the list down.
· Internet has a plethora of useful data which we should start using meaningfully. There are lots of sites nowadays where we can do free video courses: Udacity, Coursera, edX, Kadenze, Udemy, MIT OpenCourseware, KhanAcademy, Stanford Lagunita, etc are some of them. It depends upon us on how we tend to utilize the resources available on the internet.
· Once we start learning the stuff of our interest we should always compliment it with side projects to learn it while doing. This is one of the best methods of learning practically.
· Taking part in online competitions, hackathons, open-source projects helps us to network and learn from different people thus widening our knowledge about our aspirations.
There’s a possibility that we may end up with more than one option, but by this time we will be ready enough to analyze the one most suitable as we had to go through the tedious task of narrowing down the possibilities. Once all these are done properly and effectively, we have a golden opportunity to get detached from the fourth category to become a member of the first category. We are now ready to make smart choices just like Toby.
The simplest ingredients for shaping our life are the struggles we choose after analyzing properly, and it determines our future success. We might have dreamt of becoming an astronaut or a footballer or a magician when we were small kids, but that wasn’t necessarily our path. It’s not that those paths are unrealistic but we fancy things while we are kids. There is never a fixed time to succeed as every individual runs on their own customized ‘clock of fortune’; but there’s always a fixed timeline to assess our priorities. Once we learn and mature to determine our struggling priorities, we are probably not much far away from our ’pursuit of happiness’.
Food for thought while you are on the journey of determining your career:
“You got a dream, you got to protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they want to tell you, you can’t do it. You want something, go get it. Period.”
- Chris Gardener (Will Smith) in ‘Pursuit of Happyness’
