We’ve probably heard the saying, “If you do what you love then you’ll never work another day in your life.” While I do believe this sentence to a certain extent, I do think that there are aspects of a dream occupation that prove difficult and tedious as well. We, as humans, always want to find ourselves doing what we love because it makes that much easier to face the inevitable obstacles that come from earning a living in this world.

Much of who we are is defined by what kind of work we do. For some reason, this is just the way our society is wired. We tend to define people by their occupation. Not only has that, all human societies practiced social differentiation. People everywhere are categorized according to some trait (such as sex, age, race, ethnic background) and according to how much scare resources (such as wealth, power, prestige) they possesses. Furthermore, people are ranked on the basis of having or lacking some of the above attributes. Ranking involves a value judgement; in effect, the society established that is better to be one thing than another, to have more of some things than less. Eventually, all groups, humans as well as animal, develop a social hierarchy. The reason for such a hierarchy is to provide an orderly method of access to and distribution of resources. In a way, it is a method of preventing continuous fighting over scarce resources.

I would say occupation is not the “end all be all” of who a person is, but it does reveal a lot. I was always living in my dream world. At the age of seventeen, it was the age that started stepping into the society. People always tell me that I was young, naive, and thought that I could take the world by storm without earning the right to do so. I didn’t really know how the world operated. The only thing that I believe was success comes with hard work. It requires sacrifice to make it come about.

Everyone’s story is different. Perhaps you are able to go after your dreams without giving any thought to much of anything else. Great for you! But this story is just to illustrate the importance of developing and maintain a mind-set to work no matter what position you find yourself in.

In our lifetime, we’ve probably seen people who are great at what they do but they can be missing big puzzle in their life. In our hyper-fast “give it to me now” culture, all of us are always busy working. Sometimes, it make me wonder is this busyness our life’s work. Is it what we are purpose to do? Investing so much of our delicate time and effort into the current occupation, what we do get as a result? We will find ourselves in a job that we might hate and we have limited choices to begin with. One part of the reason could be because of promotion. We tend to have this mind-set that if we stay with the company long enough, we can grow to be giants in the occupations. So many people give into this destructive trait by cloaking it with the mask of busyness.

With all that said, we should know what we want to achieve in life by planning for success rather than engaging in our occupation. I am also a firm believer in the notion of pursuing one’s passion. To fill our dream occupations, it is much easier to give our all to something that we feel is a stepping stone rather than a dead end. The beauty in this thought is that there is always something in whatever we are currently doing that will help prepare us for our true passion.