Jobs

There is a famous Confuscious quote, "Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life."  I suspect many of you have heard it.  Confuscious is a famous philosopher and far smarter than me, but I have to tell you, I think he got it wrong with this quote.

I absolutely LOVE my job, but I work incredibly hard at it.  In fact, because I love it so much I probably pour even more of my time, energy and effort into what I do each day.  I have a part-time job that I also love.  I can assure you - they both require hard work, time and dedication.  But, they are both incredibly rewarding and meaningful.  My guess is that was probably the point Confuscious was trying to make.  The reality is that as human beings, we can endure almost any circumstance if we feel the end outcome will be worth it.

The reason I am even talking about this though is that I think there are a LOT of high school students (and probably some adults) who struggle trying to figure out what they want to do in life and are constantly searching for the job that they will love so that they don't have to work.  And I believe that is setting you up for failure.  Find a job that you will be good at, that you will feel you can contribute and use your personal gifts and talents to benefit others and pursue it with everything you have inside of you.  But know that there will still be days or at least parts of the job that will most definitely be struggles and feel like hard, demanding work.  Adjusting that expectation can change everything because if you are able to go into the work world with the awareness that you won't love every part of your job and that there will be hard days that you dread (and yes, I can assure you there will be plenty of both), then you will be far less likely to beat yourself up and fall into the mind trap that there must be some other job out there that will be better for you - that you won't feel like work.

There is already so much stress and pressure that you experience as high school students, adding the extra level of stress that you must find the PERFECT job that you love is a pressure you don't need to add.  We have so many career exploration opportunities for you and I want you to do them all, but I also want you to understand that you are far from done learning and growing.  You will find and explore new paths ahead of you and all of it will contribute to you finding your right place in this world.  So try to take the pressure off and enjoy the learning process.

For now, start thinking ahead a little bit.  Seniors, are you interested in participating in Senior Project?  Mrs. Stubenrauch would love to have more of you participate still this year, but you have to get a move on it right away if you are going to be able to get all of the steps completed before the deadlines.  For students in all grades, do you have plans for next Friday or for Spring Break?  Those are great opportunities for you to head out and make college visits, but they are also ideal days to ask a neighbor, friend, or extended family member if you could spend a day shadowing them to learn more about what they do each day.  The summer is also a great time to try to get some experience out shadowing and learning about what some of the job possibilities are that exist in the world today so you can start now thinking about what experiences you might like to observe.  It doesn't matter to me if you are shadowing someone for one day or doing a full senior project experience, but my hope is that you will ask the people you are spending time with what they love about their jobs, what they don't like, and if they feel like they work hard at what they do... because I suspect you will find that in every job there is definitely a LOT of work involved!