In today’s world, the word ‘career’ generally is taken to imply the principal type of remunerative work we perform throughout our adult lives. When considering the broader course of human history, the very idea of a career has only surfaced in recent centuries; a curiosity, or aberration if you will, that only reared its head since the founding of major corporations.
Given the ongoing development and advances in telecommunications and the consequent decentralization of global workforces there is no good way to tell just how much longer the idea will persist. In all honesty, if you really think about it, it is evident that the only thing a ‘career’ denotes is a person’s meandering through a series of skills and opportunities that another person set forth for them; a sort of dictated notion of where to fit in and what a person’s value is.
It has always seemed revealing to me that the word itself (career) contains the word ‘care’ within it. As if to imply that the companies and corporations for which we perform our career have taken for themselves the role of caring for us during the course of our professional adult lives. It is as if they become babysitters, keeping us from learning how to make decisions wisely or learning how to value ourselves on our own. It’s all based on a certain basic unwillingness on their behalf to let people become the managers of their own development, to determine their own worth. Which is why we supposedly have ‘careers’, to help us find the way forward in life, something which only holds much promise if and when we are deemed to be worthwhile and the employer can afford to see us promoted (which implies they have someone to fill our spot).
Considering all this, it’s no surprise so many people hate their jobs. All it is is work work work, completely based on someone else’s directives and vision of the future, all geared towards building their life and not one’s own. Nonetheless, we all continue to use the term ‘career’ as if it were the end all and be all of human existence.
I remember back to when I was a child: being babysat on the evenings when my parents would go out was never my favorite moment; what really got me going was getting to go outside to play with friends and siblings. What changes so drastically for that no longer to be the case as adults? At what point do we resign ourselves to letting someone else determine our value and degree of success? Why do we choose to yield the driver’s wheel to another? What on earth convinces us that having a ‘career’ is so incredibly important?
Now, if you bringing up the idea of ‘making a living’ well then you are finally speaking a language I can understand and appreciate. In case it slipped by you, the attention here is solely on the idea of life itself. It is a small detail that career-lusters tend to lose by the wayside. We were put on this planet to live our lives, not to be babysat; we need to live life at our very own rate, falling and getting back up on our own. The idea of letting another person set our value in this world rather than doing it ourselves does not form a part of this picture. All that is the basis of the idea of making a living: it’s about making life itself worthwhile.
And that is the thing that I really love about internet marketing. Sure, you need to learn some skills for writing successful webpages, optimizing on the search engines and the like, but they are just technical skills which anyone can learn.
No, the real thing I love about this line of work is the fact that in order to make it big you have to find what it is you are really passionate about. The reason here is simple to understand. Whatever subject you are passionate about has, to a certain measure, a language of its own; only those who really are passionate about the matter will be able to comprehend that language. By doing so, you are opening the door to being able to sell yourself to others in the same niche for the true value which you possess. Love it or leave it, but that is the way of the web.
All of which is what makes this industry so wonderful: success can only be found after one finds a passion. And it is in that sense that I consider myself to be somebody making a living, not pursuing a career. My work is my passion–even including writing this article. I no longer have the early morning blues, that contempt for having to get up in the morning to go into the office, instead I leap from the bed with energy for the new day. No more of the worrying about ‘making it’ in the typical rat race. I measure my own success based on my own creations, how they enable me to support myself, and the lifestyle (rich in family time) I get to live.
That is the beauty of internet marketing. That is why I’ll never do anything else
As a recent father, Damian Papworth recognizes the consistent tug-of-war for time, which rages between his career and his home. He always tries to find a way to enhance family life. Recently he researched baby high chairs, doing some special analysis of portable high chairs.