Love/Liking your Job

This week I'm involved in the CSSCOM COC parade, so Toxin, Sam Poh, Thomas and I are all involved in the parade. While having dinner this evening, we started talking about "don't make your interest your job, or you will no longer like it"

There are 2 cases, making your interest your job and making your passion your job, there is a stark difference, but very hard to diffrentiate between the two.

you might have a real interest in a field, be it engineering or teaching or even art, but the problem with pursuing this interest as your bread bowl results in 2 problems.

1) Money. When you depend on your interest for your ricebowl, you end up sacrificing your interest to satisfy your hunger.

2) the corporate ladder looks very similar as you get closer to the top. At the base level, an engineer's job is starkly different from a fireman or from an accountant. however look at the next level, they all have a boss/supervisor that has to manage them and instruct them what to do. Similarly when you look onto the next level, their bosses needs to manage them, they still may have some ground experience, but it decreases in frequency as their appointment goes up. Very rarely do you see the manager of a franchise cook up a tidy meal for his customers. Also, at the top, they seem to do pretty much the same thing. CEOs' job scopes do not really differ that much.

I beleive this leads to much frustration to individuals. They end up asking themselves "is this really what I signed up for?" as they realise that they have been quite far removed from thier initial interest. Getting caught up with office politicking (and yes this is inevitable) it is easy to lose sight of what you wanted to do in the first place.

The only exception to this is if your interest is in politics, then if you went into that field, you would be perfectly fine ;)

There is a difference if your interest is more than just a liking of a field, if you LOVE, your job, it may evolve into your passion.

Then your motivations change as well. It is not merely a case of wanting to do what you like, instead you want to make a difference, which is quite the perspective change.

I beleive that if you have a real love and passion to change something, then you should very well make it your job. Take for example a toy designer. Having an interest for toys is not enough, because there is a lot of team work to come up with a design, presenting to bosses kills they joy you might have had conceptualising it, you might end up miserable, or worse, Furby is back on toy shelves everywhere. On the other hand, if your love for toys is such that you want to change how toys are received or maybe how toys are played, then you would fight tooth and nail for the toys you have pitched, and this sort of passion is very difficult to go unnoticed.

No one said it will be a walk in the park, and getting to that point where you have finally been the change you want to see, is a freaking uphill battle, but achievement was only possible with all the effort put in.

I hope I'm able to be like the latter, and shake the industry I work in :) I aim to combine my interest and job together!