Why a Professional Career should become a Journey rather than a Destination
By treating a professional career as a journey instead of a be-all-end-all destination, you’ll be well on your way to understanding why the career itself is so important. It puts the person doing it in a position to think about what its purpose is for meeting all kinds of goals. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with it having a defined end when you know that you’ll die one day (which could even be today!) and might want to be prepared to change your job from time to time. But whatever the end may be, unless it happens to be within reach, it’s best to keep it completely separate and not focus on it too heavily.
For example, if your field of expertise isconstruction, and you know how to build all kinds of residential buildings, then you can team up with others like you and use that knowledge to combathomelessnesswherever you know that homeless people will benefit from your skills, at least in terms of having a roof over one’s head. To make up for where that skill is lacking, if you’re smart about how finances and the economy work, perhaps you’llknow how you can streamline financial resourcesto help these homeless people, right in the middle of their situation when it comes to paying to stay in a permanent home long enough that they don’t have to worry about moving again for the foreseeable future. Couple that with comprehensive legal knowledge about cutting through red tape, or eventraining others in a career of their choice, and there won’t be as much of a problem with using their own funds for what they’re asked to pay someone up front, either. Whatever you do best, maybe you think of it as a destination to help everyone in the world who can use your service to solve a problem. But as long as there are circumstances that can be unfavorable to that destination, and there’s a possibility of falling victim to them and no perceivable way to overcome them, it will often be more of an ideal than a practical goal to reach for the here and now.
One of the most important aspects of a professional career is the awareness of why there’s a need for it, and how your supply may keep being needed to meet a demand for the rest of your life and beyond. Knowing that there’s a problem bigger or more complex than you can solve by yourself overnight is what makes it a journey, but not everyone can expect to stay interested enough in a field of study to stay with it for an entire lifetime or even during a time of being in school, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s one of the reasons, in fact, whycollege students may decide to switch their majorright in the middle of earning credit hours toward a degree and take longer to graduate from college than they’re supposed to, if at all. Switching jobs as one sees fit isn’t all that different.
