Part 2 of 4 Of The Life Purpose Series: Career
Do Mondays Suck Or Is It Your Job?
To think about our life purpose, I always think about career because of how much time we spend working.
Cell phones and mobile devices make the office an ever expanding space with no differentiation of 9 to 5. For this reason, it is more important than ever to love what you do. Most spend a minimum of 40 hours per week at work.
We only have 168 hours per week to use, and at 8 hours of sleep per night, that is 112 waking hours left.
Let’s also factor in that most people have an average of an hour commute per day which leaves us working 40% of our lives on average from 25 to 65.
If you work 50 hour weeks, that is 49% of your life and at 60 hours that is 58% of your life.
You better be damn sure that those hours are purposeful, powerful and aligning you towards an end goal.
Now comes social media. We can’t ignore this time suck. The average is 2 hours per day. So that equates to an additional 13% of our time. Studies show 51% of people actually feel more negative after viewing social media, and that social media is addictive. Â
Add Netflix on top of that for another 2 hours and 49 minutes and Netflix having an algorithm that serves up ads for shows that align with what you previously watched and you have 30% used up in activities that are not purposeful.
Okay – Enough with the data. I’m just trying to make the point that there’s a lot of time we control that we can take back and we need to be purposeful in achieving our goals.
Now, time for that life purpose stuff…And why your #dreamjob matters.
Work Daily On What You Love To Find Fulfillment Daily
The sure fire way to suck all the joy out of life is to focus on things you hate daily.
Let me explain this further by saying that how we place meaning on things determines so much about how we feel about them. (Read the story here of the bricklayer ).
The point is, if you see how your actions contribute to the bigger picture, you will see it as a step in the right direction. If you see your actions as a monotonous task that isn’t getting you closer to your goals, you will see it as a waste of time or hope the time passes quickly.
This differentiation is huge.
So now that we understand that daily purposeful habits matter let’s discuss how you start aligning these with your purpose.
You need to know where you are going to get there. You may dream of being a writer, an employee at Apple or blogging from an island off of Hawaii.
All of these dream jobs have purposeful steps that get there.
Let’s say you want to be a travel blogger that can live from their laptop (what Millennial doesn’t #jobgoals).
There are some specific steps needed in regards to my career trajectory. I am going to look at what other travel bloggers have done and what experience they have. I’m going to contact a few to see what their advice is. And then I am going to start building those skill sets from every job I take from that point forward.
So in this case, I would be looking for jobs that help me learn how to write, take photos and start building a following. I may have to start at the bottom of the totem pole, but if I can get this experience every day, every step I take at that company is pushing me towards my dream job.
I can guarantee you that every lesson I learn around marketing is going to be one that I’m super eager to learn on someone’s else’s dime. I’m intrinsically motivated to be great at my job. That is the power of alignment and feeling that you are reaching your higher ambitions every day. This means no matter what job you currently have, you see how it’s building on the bigger picture and you take each step as an opportunity to build on your foundation.
This is the power of ALIGNMENT.
I hope this is helpful in your building your dream future and I look forward to providing more feedback if anyone has any specific questions. Thanks for reading! Please leave any comments below.
