In Search for A Career

I watched Chris Rock's standup comedy show from Johannesburg, South Africa the other day. Oddly enough, comedy sometimes is a better form of depicting things and getting an idea across. He said he used to have a job but now he's got a career. When he had a job as a shrimp scrubber, he couldn't wait for his work hours to end and time always seemed to pass too slow. Now he's got a career. He is eager to start a day and the working hours don't seem to be enough because they pass too fast. The funny man had his funny way of delivering this message so he didn’t say the exact words. While I was greatly amuzed at his funny deliverance, it dawned on me that what he said was so damn true, and the fact of matter is I need a career!

Face it. Most people have 9-5 jobs. They work at the jobs, not because that's where their passions lie, but because their jobs pay their bills. Before real estate, I took various regular 9-5 jobs. Most of the jobs to me were to accumulate unwilling hours for paychecks. The paychecks would NEVER, EVER make me independently wealthy but they ensure not to starve me to death either. Hanging to a job was just enough to hang my breath from paycheck to paycheck. The me I knew lived two lives: the life at work and the life after work. My life at work was like a dead woman walking. I only lived off work hours, i.e. 24 hours deducted by those working hours. Life is short. Life is shorter if 1/3 of it does not count. It makes sense to do only what you love doing so you don't cut your life shorter by your own choosing. The only jobs that did make me feel alive were several power plant field jobs. At least at jobsites, you saw with your own eyes the project progressing from bare beginning to finish. All what you did, small or big, contributed to the final products - power plants. With the rest of the jobs I took, I worked in the corporate offices shuffling papers, punching numbers, attending meetings, or staring at computers, purposeless between this assignment and that assignment. In general, I concluded the bigger the company size is and the higher your ranking in the company is, the more individual freedom you have. It's less miserable if you work for a Fortune 500 international company. A sheer number of employees in a large company makes you less visible. Nobody even noticed if I slipped away for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. In a small-size company, don't even think about it! No way! If you hold a management or executive level position, you dont' need to ask your staff's permission for leaving the office earlier and you will more likely travel to some meeting locations where everyone else wants to vacation. If you are not a manager, no way! I got about 10-12 days paid vacation a year. I used to mark my calender with the countdown days to my next permitted extended release from my cubicle, cell number ###.  Of course, occasionally a job gave me enough things to occupy my time, and an occupied mind is a happy mind, so for a while I was happy. The rest of the time, I was not busy but had to pretend to be busy. Giving others an impression of being busy protects you from any potential layoffs. Since I had nowhere to run other than sitting in front of my computer "working" away, I had written some of my best uninterrupted long emails those days. Sometimes, paid business trips, free team building meals and company parties could also be fun. Sometimes, a work task could be seemingly challenging, giving me a temporary sense of accomplishment, especially when that accomplishment was noticed and acknowledged, enough to delude me to feel like a big shot in the work place. Born of a very competitive nature, no matter what job I took, I wanted to excel. My “Anything you can do, I can do better” attitude often earned me a reputation as a workaholic or an aggressive, the best kind of worker in a work place. Many times, the corporate ladders were on sight for me to climb only if I stayed and played the game. As it turned out, I usually left and didn't want to make that job a lifetime job - a career in my understanding at the time. When you first got into a new job, for the first few months there were new things to learn. Soon after you learned the new little tricks, a job fell into the boring routine again. The job veil finally unveiled to me one day when I learned from my part-time MBA program financial management class that the sole purpose of a corporation was to maximize the corporate shareholders' share values. So all the time, I as a non-shareholder, was just working for that sole purpose? So my purposeless work after all did have a purpose: that is to make someone else richer. My career fantasy, ie. making a job working for someone else as a career fantasy was smashed.

Ok. If we don't want to be a mini, tiny work force that adds to the maximization of the shareholders' profits, what options are there? Is there such a thing in the world that you can do and you love to do, and earn you a pretty good living? We have all heard those advices about following your heart and money will follow. So the first thing is to find your passion. What is that one thing that you are passionate about, above everything else? First of all, identifying that passion is a bit of a challenge for me, as I'm passionate about many useless things. Secondly I doubt in reality, making a living out of your passion would really work. There are no lack of starving artists. They followed their hearts or passions. Look what happened. Isn’t it like other people tell you to pray to God and God will listen? Then you realize you are God because you are really the only one who listens. Recently, I was making steady little income from blogging. Though not enough to brag about, I thought I peeped my possible career choice. Maybe I can make a career out of two things I enjoy doing: traveling and writing like Anthony Bourdain, or opening a cozy coffee house having live music, homemade pastry, good coffee, and all my useless arts and crafts? That thought was interrupted as soon as I looked around at the business people around me, and as soon as I read what Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love." Anthony is a smart business guy. So job vs career should not be that black and white. There might be a middle ground. That might be where job happiness meets money success.

My husband always tells me "Once you step your foot in real estate, you are unemployed". After these many years, I realize he is right. Actually, once you become self-employed and once you've tasted the freedom and sweet pay from being self-employed, it’s hard, almost unbearable to think about a 9-5 job. However, as real estate business in the US continues to gloom, my once seemingly sweet career becomes more and more a job without realizing it, until I caught up with Chris Rock's show. Now I am forced to examine my career choices and think what I should have started a long time ago. 1. What is my passion? 2. Can I make a career out of it? If 2 is negetive, then 3 where is the interface - the middle ground I can stand on?