You will never find your dream job

Today I am going to talk to you about a misconception that we have.  I had this too.

When we understand that the work we have does not fulfil us, and we cannot continue doing this work, we enter into a mindset, an expectation that the next job I'm going to find will be the perfect one. I will find my dream job! The job will pay well, will serve me and the world and will be aligned with my passion!

What do we do then? We immediately open a new browser tab, type in the address of job portal and start looking for jobs. We look for the perfect job that is the opposite of what we have right now. Everything we miss in our current job should exist in the new job.  We have this enormous expectation, which makes difficult for the job to fulfil. There will rarely be one that does fulfill everything we require and even if it did it would not be the dream job because we have special glasses on that makes us oversee all the other things that are important to us, some of which we might actually have had in our last job. So, it is never a good idea to start a job search right away when you are unfulfilled but it is absolutely a terrible idea to look for your dream job because you will never find it.

Because the dream job does not exist.

The dream job does not exist because it is never a pure dream. Most of the time it is a little shitty dream. Oops did I say shit? Yes, and intentionally because I want to refer the term author Mark Manson uses. He uses this term for finding your purpose and the exact way he says it that choosing your purpose is choosing your favourite flavour of shit sandwich. Because whatever job you do, there will always be aspects you don't like.

I can speak from experience. For years I have dreamt of having my own business where I could choose my own work, be creative, manage my own time, be useful to people and now I have it all. But I also am swallowing my shit sandwich: doing the invoices, making plans, kicking my own ass to get something going, preparing marketing plans, being patient, managing the uncertainty. I love my work but not every part of it is a dream.

Even though there was a dream job, whose dream is it? It is the dream of the current you, which  hopefully will change tomorrow. Because living is growing, is transforming, is expanding. The one who wants to have a dream job now, will have a different dream job soon. There will never be one dream job that will forever be yours.

And as you are changing so is the world.  I don't know when you were born but when I was a child, we used to listen to music and watch videos via cassettes. My father used to work in a casette factory as an engineer who was responsible for the paint of the magnetic tapes. CDs emerged and kicked out casette from our lives completely and the factory my father used to work went bankrupt and my father lost his job. In his case, it was not his dream job, but could be someone's. And whatever dream job you may find right now might follow the same destiny as my father's, it can be wiped off the face of the earth.

But the opposite is also possible. Your dream job might not yet have emerged.  When I was born there was no profession called Social Media Manager or Coach. Who knows what new jobs will emerge. Maybe one will be your dream job but then after some years another one might be.

What I am saying is you will never find your dream job because there is no ONE dream job to find. Everything changes: you, jobs, the world... So instead of looking for your dream job I want you to create the job you love and keep on creating as the time goes, as you change and as the world changes.

See work you love as a work in progress and your steps as playground. Approach it with playfulness and curiosity. Start with getting curious about yourself. Create your personal inventory: What are your values? What is important to you? What are your talents? What are your skils? What are your interests? Ask your friends and colleagues too. People can see our talents much better than we do.

Start looking for jobs only after you finished the personal inventory. Find a job or work that energises you and that is aligned with your values and stay open to your inner impulses to continue creating your work. Pay attention to what energises you, where you are getting more curious, what you want to learn more about? Make little projects to see your impact in the work, on yourself and others, continue doing more of what works, change it, make it yours, make it art. Keep creating, keep watching out for your inner responses and responses of the world and make changes.

You will never find your dream job but you will create the work you love.