Welcome back! It's been a while for me and one of my friends this weekend wondered if the reason I haven't posted in a while was because I've been working too much and she may very well have a point (thanks for the motivation, Betsy). Well I wanted to continue the conversation about work and life and talk about something I see increasingly for me and with others the more I talk to people about their work.
I think that people sometimes talk about their dream job and some people actually get their dream job. I was talking to my friend Ben Horrigan the other week and he has just finished Physician's Assistant School and he got a job in orthopedics at Union Memorial Sports Medicine. When I was talking to Ben about this, he literally said, "This is my dream job". I'm really happy for Ben, and proud of him too - he knew what he wanted to do, studied hard in school, and pursued his dreams. Now I don't know any definite statistics, but I'd guess that for if polled, maybe less than 20% of people would say that they are working in their dream job. Maybe even less that 10%, I don't know.
What I do know is that the way I got into my career path/field of work was nothing like the way Ben did it. In college I started studying music education, then changed my major to psychology, then narrowed that to specialize in clinical psychology and finished with that. Then I got my first job right out of college, worked that full time and started grad school part time. My first job, led to another job, which led to yet another job - all with the same organization. My decision-making process was quite different than following my dreams. I knew what I was interested in, and just looked at different opportunities that presented themselves along the way. Although I feel like I am quite driven at work, in a lot of ways I feel that when I was navigating career decisions, the career path choose me, not the other way around. That's not to say that I don't really like my job, because I really do. I just don't really think I planned out my dream and navigated towards that.
But do people need to work their dream job? When I talk to my wife, Kate about this her obvious "dream job" would be to work at Charm City Cakes, the popular bakery that was featured on the show Ace of Cakes on the Food Network. Kate loves baking and decorating cakes and she loved that show even more. In the last couple years, Kate has made and decorated a bunch of cakes for professional parties, birthday parties, and even weddings - and the cakes look and taste amazing! It's neat to see how she has been able to fulfill that "dream job" interest while still working a "regular" job that she has interest in as well. All this to say that not everyone has to work in their dream job in order to do what they are passionate about.
What do you think?
ps. if people are having trouble commenting in the blogger format, let me know.
