Do You Want Your Job?

My mother was a teacher for over 35 years. She was great at her job, well respected by her peers, and had built up a strong reputation and network that could pretty much guarantee her advancement in her career. Co-workers constantly told her that she should apply for assistant head, or head teacher positions, and yet she never did. Friends had a hard time understanding why. ‘You could be earning double what you are now!’ ‘You could have more flexible hours.’ Harsher criticism came from other teachers, who would see my mother’s lack of desire to move up the ranks as a lack of success, or understanding of the system. Friends had a hard time understanding why. ‘You could be earning double what you are now!’ ‘You could have more flexible hours.’ Harsher criticism came from other teachers, who would see my mother’s lack of desire to move up the ranks as a lack of success, or understanding of the system. As I went to school, and began to follow the well-worn steps I was supposed to as a well educated, middle class, suburbanite (school, university, job, marriage, kids, retirement), I joined in their confusion at her reluctance to put herself forward for promotion. I was uncomfortable with her being 'content'. Did she want to move forward, to a better job?

In fact, it was quite the opposite. My mother loved teaching. She loved being with the children, watching the light come into their eyes as they suddenly grasped a new concept. She shared their simple pride of being able to tie their shoe laces for the first time, or recite the 8 times multiplication table without a mistake. She did the job because she loved teaching; she never climbed the career ladder because she loved teaching. She was well aware that earning more money meant spending less time in the classroom and more time behind a desk. Less marking papers (she always left little smiley faces when a child got full marks) and more paperwork. More flexible hours just meant more meetings, more seminars, more training courses. She loved her job, and no amount of coaxing or criticism could persuade her to trade her calling as a classroom teacher for more money or perceived ‘success.’

My mother is the exception to the rule. I know many other people who have chosen more difficult career paths, which ultimately lead to a destination job that they never chose for themselves. Most of them have taken steps up the career ladder purely because of prompting from other people in their lives. Co-workers who they felt in competition with, bosses who persuaded them to take on more responsibilities in order to help them further their own goals, friends who helpfully encouraged them to advance, partners who they wanted to earn more money for. Some have even ended up working long hours, doing tasks they hate, in a stressful environment, simply because it is the norm in their industry or society to keep reaching for the next level. Yet in advancing they have lost their passion for the job that they originally took.

Promotion is something that many of us long for. We may want the extra responsibility, higher pay, better benefits. However, we should always check that our motivation for advancing is our own. When someone asks you ‘Don’t you want more?’ it is alright to say ‘No!’ A close friend of mine trained for years at university to be a psychiatrist, and after two years working in the field he quit and now tends bar in a quiet, sunny corner of the world. I once asked him how he could give up a prestigious career and generous paycheck for a dead-end job serving Coronitas and beer nuts. He looked at me with a face free from care and explained that he had put himself through school by working in a bar, and had always loved the job. He had graduated and got a good job until he realised that he was only doing it because it had been expected of him. In his new life as a barman he earned enough money to pay his bills and play golf every week, and he spent his free time with friends who didn’t compare cars, and saw swimming pools as a place to have fun with their kids instead of status symbols.

The following week I had lunch with another friend who was an accountant. As his experience and reputation had grown over the years, so did his paycheck, and his workload along with it. With each advancement he ‘upgraded’ his lifestyle, so although he had two cars, and a beautiful home in an upper class neighbourhood, he was working so hard to pay for it all that he had little time to enjoy the fruits of his labour. Did he enjoy his job, I asked? He laughed, ‘Does anyone enjoy their job? It’s a good job. Pays well, and in another twenty years I can retire happily to a quiet, sunny corner of the world and play some golf!’ The irony was not lost on me. I knew that he was not the kind of person who could be happy working in a bar and living day to day, but even so, I wondered how much he was in control of the pace of his life as a tide of expectations and pressures from his peers swept him to higher and higher heights within his career.

Our society loves a winner. It is ingrained in us from a very early age to do our best, to keep working towards goals, to succeed. We are driven to work hard and get to the top. With so much focus on reaching the top, it has become almost unacceptable for us to be content anywhere else. Sometimes, we are trying so hard to ‘get somewhere in life’ that we never even realise when we arrive at a place in life where we want to be. Having goals is great, as long we are sure that they are our goals and not purely the expectations of others.