Steve Jobs, late Apple co-founder and world-renowned technology and business innovator, once said, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And, the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” It’s an apt piece of advice, but as with most clever quips about better living it is always harder to do than it is to talk about. Finding work that one enjoys and that also pays the bills is a genuine dream come true and if it were easy everyone would be doing it.
These five tips may not lead to a dream job, but they will help anyone who is looking get closer to finding what makes them whistle while they work.
1. Experiment
There are people who are born knowing what they want to do for the rest of their lives. They’re called doctors and astronauts, and are really the only professions that require pre-teen commitment to achieve. The rest of the options in the working world are up for grabs.
It’s hard for a person to know what he or she will like without trying it. The important thing to remember is that this does not necessarily require a big commitment. Companies like VocationVacations offer people an opportunity to try jobs they think might interest them, but even a simple job-shadowing experience can do the trick.
2. Test Your Personality
Personality tests often get a bad rap, but a personality test is like any tool: it must be used correctly to have any worthwhile purpose at all. These tests are not the paper equivalent of a Magic 8-Ball; they are designed to reveal clues about a person’s skills, temperament and talent.
The trick to getting the most out of a personality test is to know how to take it, and then knowing how to interpret the results. People should answer questions naturally rather than trying to “beat” the test, and once the results are in they should be taken for what they are – one indicator out of many regarding suitable careers.
3. Identify Your Passions
This is perhaps the hardest thing to do, although the most effective if it can be done. The problem lies in the ambiguity of passion and the shifting meaning of it. In other words, passion is hard to define and it also changes throughout one’s life.
The best way to identify passion is to take what a person loves to do and attempt to equate that with an activity that pays a salary. Love food and cooking? Take a culinary class to see if learning advanced skills comes naturally. Enjoy getting into and winning arguments? Consider law school. The point is that there are no secrets – and no limits.
4. Find “Flow”
The concept of “flow” in psychology is one of intense focus; so much so that a person is fully enveloped in an activity and unconcerned with outside distractions. Sportier individuals might call it being in the zone.
This is the act of adding awareness to experimentation. People must try different things to find the best fit, but they also have to know how to spot success, or in this case feel it. Identifying flow is as easy as losing track of time. If a person is engaged in an activity so thoroughly that when they complete it they are shocked to find hours have passed – they have found flow.
5. Ask People Who Know
There are no stupid questions when it comes to deciding how to spend 40+ hours of any given week. Many people allow their careers to choose them rather than other way around, even though it will take up a large slice of their lives.
Interviewing people who already have dream jobs is a great way to find out how dreamy they really are and what it takes to get them. This can be more involved in the form of intern or job-shadow experiments (as previously mentioned), or as easy as finding Internet forums where people chat about the kinds of work they do and asking a lot of questions.
In a nutshell, finding a job you love takes time and research. Sure, there’s much to be said for being in the right place at the right time, but you can increase your odds on succeeding in that, too, with these five tips.
This guest post is contributed by James Madeiros who writes for Criminal Justice Degree Schools, a career site with information on how to earn a criminal justice degree.