Striving for Success?
The other day, I felt stressed. I was getting frustrated with my job, feeling like I wasn’t achieving anything. The quarter life crisis was breathing down my neck for the first time.
Fuck, I’m nearly 25 and what have I achieved?
It feels like now that I’m in work, the years are passing by without much differentiation between them, other then which house I was living or who I was dating. This was weighing down on me. I was having doubts about my new role and feeling like I hadn’t learnt anything new or got what I needed out of it. If I took up a new role, I wouldn’t be able to do all the things that I should be expected to do at my current level.
My worries niggled away at me and I started to think that I would never be fully qualified to do anything and have to ‘right’ transferable skills for any role.
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It was time to go for a drink with my sister.
My sister talks a lot of sense. She can calm you down with one sentence. She made me realise that I wasn’t really enjoying my job. It hadn’t really occurred to me, even though my housemates, friends and family would ask often how my week had been and my response always resembled something negative. I hadn’t realised myself.
I had left another good job for this and told myself I would stick out my year long contract in order to get a bit of continuity on my CV. I had been too busy focusing on gaining more work skills, not realising that the job basically wasn’t what I had expected it to be.
I’ve really been just trying to make myself look good on paper.
I had been taking extra courses to put something else down in the ‘qualifications’ box, even though I’m not getting a lot out of these extra qualifications. I’ve been looking at volunteering somewhere in the little free time I have, to focus on developing another skill in case I want to progress in a career in another area. I wanted to do more things, but only to tick more boxes and put down more experience on my CV.
I’ve been looking at myself like a product I can pass onto another company and what I could add to it to further my success. Not like an actual individual person, who can bring a lot more to the table the ‘skills’ and ‘experience’.
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After discussing this with my sister, we both felt that there is an immense pressure to be a ‘success’ in our society. When she visited other places on her travels, she found this isn’t the case. In some places, work can be, just work. Just a way to earn the pennies, not something to judge a person on.
I feel like here, one of the first questions you ask someone you’ve just met is: ‘What do you do?’ As if you can tell what sort of a person they are from the job they do. Really I think we should be asking: ‘What do you like to do in your free time?’ Or, ‘What are you really passionate about?’
We would probably find out a lot more about someone by asking these questions, particularly in today’s job market where people have to take jobs they might not be so interested in.
The problem is, there are so many of us and not enough higher paid, good jobs to go around. So many of us end up working similar low paid admin roles hoping we will work our way up. Many of us were encouraged to get a degree, because we were told you had to, to get a good job.
However, some of us are feeling slightly cheated, underpaid and undervalued, wishing we could put our talents to more stimulating work.
I didn’t feel I got enough warning about the difficulties of finding a stimulating job. It wasn’t our fault that this happened, but it has, and we need to look at our positives, before we blame ourselves for not being good enough. It is exceptionally hard to get a good job and employers want more and more, simply because they can ask for it. I’m hoping this will slowly grind to a halt before we’re expected to have done a year’s unpaid work combined with a PHD and knowledge of how to build a spacecraft.
What you do for a job and what skills you can put down on paper shouldn’t have to define you. You are much, much more and shouldn’t be reduced to a few transferable skills! We are people, with interests, values and personality – not work robots!
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Tags: achievements career Joy quarter life crisis skills success
Categories: Becky Solomon
2 Comments
I agree with your sister. In many places I have lived, work is just work. It is not something to judge a person on. It is just something people have to do with their time in order to get by in life. That said, it is such a joy to do something you like with your time. Your money-earner doesn’t have to fulfil you emotionally, but you do need SOMETHING to do that, and wouldn’t it be lovely if you could do that with the majority of your time? You do have to remember that 25 is NOT old (no matter what anyone says) – you have plenty of time to work out the balance between earning money and soul fulfilling stuff. Try your hand at as many things as you possibly can and don’t worry about what’s on paper too much – the paper is only there to help get you into a face-to-face situation with employers etc. There are other ways to get there too!!
Great authentic post. My opinion is try and stop identifying yourself with a job that isn’t in alignment with your visions and aspirations of yourself. I also think that in life you must sometimes continuously hack away at the unessential, once you do that you’ll be left knowing with what you want to do.
Eventually you’ll find your what you’re passionate about and the great saying of ‘Do what you love and you’ll NEVER WORK a day in your life.’ will come into effect.
Keep going!