Tag: Profession

10 Most Loved Jobs…(and the 10 most hated)

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From the HBR Blog Network: Happiness Will Not Be Downloaded.  I draw the line on a solve being fixing things yourself Smile otherwise a great post.  A few excerpts from the post below along with the charts for the 10 Most Loved Jobs and the 10 Most Hated…

Ten Most Loved Jobs

“…The proliferation of cooking shows, blogs, celebrity chefs…taps into something more primal: it’s one of the last jobs that still does what most of us don’t — make things…In this sterile, white-collar world, where meat comes from ShopRite and homes are built by “guest workers,” cooking is the last physical job many of us can relate to.”

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Does your family come out on top?

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From Clay Christensen’s Life Lessons, Bloomberg Businessweek. By Bradford Wieners

"…How Will You Measure Your Life? is sharpest on staying motivated in your career and, above all, on parenting…To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they do. The same logic applies to one’s life. For example, ambitious people will reliably tell you that family, or being a mother or father, is the most important thing in their lives. Yet when pressed to choose between racing home to deal with a chaotic pre-bedtime scene and staying another hour at the office to solve a problem, they will usually keep working. It’s these small everyday decisions that reveal if you’re following a path to being the best possible spouse and parent. If your family matters to you, when you think about all the choices you’ve made with your time in a week, does your family come out on top?"

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The Era of Prosperity-on-Auto-Pilot Is Over

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From GapingVoid:

“Hardly a mor­ning goes by these days without me hea­ring some story…about Ame­ri­can eco­no­mic woe…

The Great Con­ver­gence is upon us, and our friend, the Inter­net is acce­le­ra­ting the pro­cess…

The good news is, if you have a talent, the world wants it, and it has never been so easy to show your talent to the world…

The bad news is, espe­cially for us fat & lazy Ame­ri­cans, is that the great, century-long era of Prosperity-on-Autopilot  is over…

The world still wants serious talent. And it still wants peo­ple doing the grunt work: pushing mops, dig­ging ditches, wai­ting tables, ans­we­ring pho­nes, flip­ping bur­gers etc…

Learn how to work hard, work long hours. Find something you love, and then excel at it. Above all else, learn how to create, learn how to invent. That’s your only hope, really.

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Why you will fail to have a great career…

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Larry Smith is a professor of economics at University of Waterloo. He coaches his students to find the careers that they will truly love. The most notable start-up he advised in its infancy is Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry. (No commentary please from the audience on how his advise is working for RIM now…Smile)

While I didn’t find any earthshattering revelations here, I did find Smith to be an engaging and inspirational storyteller in his presentation of the excuses we invent in failing to pursue our passions – – excuses including:

  • “There are no more great jobs, all the good jobs are disappearing”
  • “Great careers are a matter of luck”
  • “People who have great careers are geniuses, special one-of-kind”
  • “In 1950’s, competency would land you a good job. Today, not so much given how competitive it is…”
  • “I would do this (pursue my passion) but I’m not weird or obsessive…there is a fine line between great, weird and madness…and this is why normal people don’t have great careers”
  • “If you work hard, you can have a good career. But you need to work really really hard to have a great career and you are not prepared to sacrifice _____ (family, children, friends, etc.)
  • “I value my relationships more than my accomplishments. I will not sacrifice them in pursuit of my passion or a great career.”

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Do what you love?

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We’ve all either given or received the career advice: “Follow your dreams.”  “Do what you love.”  “Love what you do.”

Recently, there have been an increasing number of counterarguments making the case that if we were all going to “do what we love,” we’d starve doing it.

I came across a 2006 post by Paul Graham: “How To Do What You Love” that offers what may be the best thought-leadership on the subject that I have read.

Graham is an essayist, programmer, and investor. In 1995, he co-developed the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.  Graham’s blog is one of the most followed in the blogosphere.

It is an essay (longish for those of us with ADD) but I would encourage you to read it in its entirety as my excerpts below don’t give his work its due:

“To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.”

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