As a first jobber, or maybe even as a human being, we tend to keep questioning about what we do in life. Among the things that we do, working takes a huge amount of our time, at least 1/3 of our weekdays for corporate employees. As I know my time is limited, I can’t help but keep questioning: do I really like what I’m doing? Am I focusing on the right thing? Is this what I wanna do for the rest of my life? I know I’m always subconsciously trying to find the answer, and recently I realized some things which could be useful to help me answer those questions:

#1 Hobby vs Career

We all have something we like to do. & I think safe to say that it’s many people’s dream to make a living out of their hobby — which means, turning a hobby into a career. But the thing is: if we take it as a hobby we can choose to just do what we like. But if we take it as a career, in many cases… we can’t. Especially in our early-stage and if it is our main source of income. Let’s say we like graphic design, & we’re trying to make it our career. In early-stage, we might need to just accept whatever project we’re offered to make our ends meet. Even if that means we need to change the design font from Helvetica into Jokerman because that’s what the client (a.k.a the one who pays us) wants.

This actually applies not only in hobby-turned-into-career cases. Whatever our career is, there will always be shitty things that we need to do. Even the CEOs might hate signing tons of documents & appearing in monthly released internal videos. Who knows?

#2 Skills.. are they the most important?

What is the most important aspect to become successful in a career? Is it the skill we have? Communication, analytical thinking, leadership, you name it. Or is it something else? Having skills is indeed very valuable, but it is not the most important — or at least not the only important thing. The more important thing is the choices we make using the skills that we have. If we have the skills but we keep making the wrong choices, we won’t succeed. But first thing first: we need to have the skills to make those choices. If we don’t have enough skills, the options that we can choose will be more limited, or we might not even get to make a choice. The choices could be about anything, whether we wanna be an entrepreneur or an employee; or what kind of business we wanna have; or what kind of company we work for; or many other things. And yes, there will always still be shitty things that we need to do in whatever career we have. But if we have better skills, we can choose shitty things that we wanna do, the shitty things we want to tolerate for our expected outcomes. The CEOs might hate signing tons of documents, but it might still be less shitty than having to deal with 100 mad customers every day. On a side note, of course, having skills and making the right choices are not the only ones in the success equation, there’s also a very influential variable — privilege. Some people might not even be able to have certain skills because of their lack of privilege and I think it’s really hard to solve this. But at least for me, having skills and making choices are things that I can still relatively have control more.

#3 The mindset in trying something new

There are unlimited combinations to be successful as well as unlimited definitions of success. Therefore when we’re talking about having skills, it’s not only about sharpening the skills we have now, it’s also about opening ourselves to something new. However, at some times we might find ourselves trying something new because we want to prove it to other people. Especially those who underestimate us and those who we feel competitive with. And it’s pretty toxic if we make validations from others as our main reason for trying new things. We might just stop trying enough if we don’t get the feedback from others that we expect. The better way to put it is: trying new things not to prove anything to anyone, but to have more options. After all, it will be the options that matter to us. Not the validation. Yes, we might still need validation from people to make those options available, but just only from certain people, not everyone. Sometimes, we’re not even clear about who these certain people are. For example, I’m an artist and I want to try exploring a new art style. If I put validation as my main reason, I might stop once people still think that my art style is boring despite my effort to try the new one. But if I put having more options as our main reason, I will be more likely to keep improving myself until there are potential clients who like my new style to reach me out.

Actually, these realizations might be nothing new, even for me. I know deep down I have always known these things. However, it feels good to be reminded again, take note of them, and act upon it. They might not directly answer the life questions which I told you at the beginning of this writing, but I find them useful to be more realistic in viewing things and making decisions.

And if you’re wondering where did I get these realizations from, it’s from a Chinese survival show to form a new girl group: Youth with You 2… lol. I just find it funny and surprising how I could find these relatable realizations from an entertainment show because I used to blame myself for spending 20+ hours watching the show. I guess there is really no fixed formula to learn something. We don’t always need to sign up for webinars, reading books, or have a mentor to learn things.

Lastly, please kindly note that I’m obviously not a career expert. I just want to share my realizations about “career” which I want to believe and hold on to. I hope they’re useful for someone out there, but it’s also okay to have different opinions!

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(This post was originally published on 20 June 2020)