WORK THAT MATTERS

This blog aims to provide helpful information in choosing or changing your career. Work takes up too much time to be stressful, miserable, dull, or depressing.

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There are three essential parts to choosing work that will satisfy both your head and heart:

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1. You have to know yourself.

2. You have to know the labor market.

3. You have to know how to conduct a dynamite job search.

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Here's a good place to start:

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Rule # 1: It's HOW You Work, Not What You Do

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Philosopher Matthew Fox tells of an Auto Mechanic who was depressed by his work but stuck with his job because of family responsibilities. He saw his work as meaningless. Through the advice of a Sufi teacher, he began to speak a religious term each time he turned the ratchet to repair a vehicle. By doing this his whole relationship with his work changed. “Now”, he said, “I love my work. I love cars. They are alive. It is a mistake to think of cars as inanimate. A car will tell you, if you listen deeply enough, whether it wants to be repaired or whether it wants simply to be left alone to die.”

Does this story sound silly to you? It is not as unusual as you might think. Gardeners will tell you that plants tell them what they need. Pet owners will tell you that they understand their animals’ communications completely. Homeowners will tell you that they have an unexplainable connection with their houses and sometimes know intuitively what attention the house needs. Artists and scientists will tell you that they are given ideas and information from sources that they do not know about and do not understand.
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To think about your work as a living thing, to tend to it because the tending somehow matters, will bring you closer to good work.

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People who do good work feel that their job means something, that in some way large or small what they do makes a real difference to somebody, or to some situation or some event. It does not matter if the worker is the President of General Motors or the Grill Cook in the company cafeteria. It does not matter how much money the job pays. What matters is that the work matters. And what matters most of all is HOW you work, not WHAT you do.