Your Career Is Not Like A Marriage

In the highly competitive and constantly changing world in which we live today, there are so many interesting career opportunities that it's very difficult for most people to make a perfect decision the first time.

In fact most people worry because they think a career is like a marriage, to be broken only by failure or death. This is not true. You have to accept your uncertainties as normal. It is only a few early-maturing people, and the number is very small, who know from adolescence what they want to do. But the rest of us have to find out.

The Information Age has created so many interesting opportunities that it's difficult for most people to make a perfect decision the first time. Perfect or not, it seems most people do look at their work as they would look at their marriage, as a permanent thing. If it's not what they happen to like, well they often think that's just too bad, that they're stuck with it. That's not true either.

One of the great tragedies of our educational system is that it often steers young people into the more acceptable or better known fields simply because it's easier to get them to conform to the curriculum then it is for the school to branch out into less popular studies.

For example, a student who wants to be an entrepreneur or an investor gets discouraged or steered away from doing what he or she wants to do and ends up being a lawyer, or a CPA, an engineer or some type of computer professional.

But with this being said, people who dream of more interesting, more challenging and perhaps, more rewarding work should ask themselves very seriously what is preventing them from fulfilling their dream.

No matter what field a person chooses, there's always room for someone who's excellent at what he or she does. People in that field are getting older; they're moving up and out, retiring, and sometimes there are very few in the field at all.

If people can discover the field they would like to enter, chances are they can get into it, if they're willing to make a few sacrifices. It might mean going back to school or starting all over at the bottom, but if they want it bad enough, they can get into it.

Remember, too, that in the Industrial Age most people in most jobs were restricted to work in the country of their birth. Today, the whole world, or at least a big part of it, is available.

Opportunities are literally everywhere. There's a kind of work that can be congenial and interesting to just about everyone if people will just go to the trouble of deciding what it is they want to do and then getting the education and experience they need to do it well.

As I have mentioned many times before, the happiest and most successful people in this world are those who enjoy and can find personal fulfillment in their work.