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Let me go over some telling statistics courtesy of The Conference Board.
(The Conference Board are the same really smart folks that give us the Consumer Confidence Index.)
- Only 14% of people love what they do for a living. That means 86% of people don’t love what they do for a living.
- 50% of people would change careers given the chance.
Let’s see… 86% of people don’t love what they do, but yet only 50% would change careers given the chance. That leaves 36% who don’t love what they do but still wouldn’t change jobs given the chance? What’s that all about?
If you looked at the numbers behind the numbers like I did, you’d see that those 36% are “satisfied” with their job. In other words, they’re just OK with their job.
Here’s the way I look at those stats. Your job is much like a relationship. In fact, most people spend more waking hours with their job than they do in their relationship with their significant other.
If you were to ask someone how it was going with the relationship with their significant other, and they said, “It’s OK. I’m satisfied”, what would you think?
Of course, you’d believe something is missing with that relationship. But for some reason, we don’t hold the same standards to our relationship with our career that we do to our significant other, even though it takes up more of our life. Why?
We’ve been brainwashed that it’s OK to not love our job. In fact, it’s expected. Even though the job system is largely to blame for this, the way we identify ourselves to others is even more to blame.
With our clients, we play a very cool game that explains this better than I can write it. So I’ll stop there and present this video to you. It is a very interesting concept that I've found provokes a lot of thinking.
Does this concept apply to you, too. Are you seeing red in your life? Take the free Reality Check and see how much you're using the real you in your life today. It's fun!!
Author:
Dave Dutton - Founder of Dave Dutton - Founder of stuckinarut.com - “Answering the question for all ages, "What do I want to be when I grow up.”
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Comments
08.12.10
@Jrandom42: I wrote that post back in 2008, and if you notice, I posted a comment on it in 2008 as well. You apparently read it back then, too (assuming you're the same guy) but you may have not caught my reply:
Here's the comment I wrote:
Erica Douglass
September 27, 2008 8:51 pm
Hi all,
I'm Erica - the author of this article. First of all, thank you so much for your comments!
@jrandom42 - That should encourage you to start a business! One of the reasons I started a business was to prove that I could be successful. Admittedly, it's not the best goal to have long-term, but short-term (especially since I was just 20 years old when I started my hosting company) it was quite effective. To be one of the few who did succeed is an excellent feeling. You can capture that feeling now and use it as motivation to move forward.
To those of you who are questioning how $20,000 isn't a lot of money -- I'd like to clarify this statement. Notice how I started the business with severance pay from a job. The severance pay totaled about $6700, but I had to live on that, too. So I did everything myself -- from the website to the order form to marketing and promotion to installing servers.
I also did consulting for nearly three years to "pay the bills" while my company developed. I started my business in July 2001, but it wasn't until 2004 that my business made enough money for me to finally be comfortable quitting consulting.
The $15,000 my parents gave me in 2002 was an inheritance from my grandmother, who had died. It was all my dad received from her, but he agreed to loan it to me. (My mom thought he was crazy and said he'd never see a return.) Interestingly enough, when I sold the business last year, I asked him when he'd like his money back, and he said "I'll ask for it someday when I need it." I plan to invest the money for him -- right now it's sitting in a high-yield savings account, earning interest for my dad and I to share.
To summarize quickly:
July 2001 - I start my business with severance pay that also has to pay my own living expenses. I have no job, but a couple consulting gigs that help keep me afloat. I lived pretty frugally at that point.
September 2002 - My dad gives me a $15,000 loan when my grandmother dies. I dedicate my company to her memory and use the money to buy server hardware, which I then lease back to customers. I lease all of the server hardware within 3 months, and my company is growing faster thanks to my new customers.
-Erica
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