Brazen Careerist has an excellent post on how to find meaningful work. She says:
"Work doesn't give your life meaning. The idea that your happiness correlates to your satisfaction with your work is misguided. What you need from work is to make sure it's not undermining your ability to create sanity in your life. Work is a way to get sanity, to make sure you are growing and you feel secure while you do it. Here's what you need from a job to get that:
- A short, predictable commute
- Workflow you can manage
- Clear goals that are challenging
- Two co-workers you're close friends with
Once you have those things in your job, then it is not up to your job to create meaning in your work, it is up to you."
I agree completely except for the part about the short, predictable commute. That's a distinctly personal preference. I have a friend who recently bought her dream home - a ranch an hour outside the city. I could never handle a commute like that. Yet when I asked my friend about her commute and she acknowledged it was long but said, "I love my work and don't mind driving in. On the way home, the farther I get from the city, the less stress I feel, and when I turn the curve and see my land in the distance I get this huge smile on my face!" For her, the trade-off is completely worth it.
I think the main point is to make sure not to build your life around your job. Figure out how and where you want to live, then subordinate your income generating activities to your goals to create that life. For my friend, the keys to having the ranch she always dreamed of included a) a substantial income to pay for it; and b) work she enjoyed enough that she was willing to handle the commute. But make no mistake - while she "enjoys" her work, her meaning is found in the barn and the garden.
Read BC's posting, and then let us know - what do YOU need to have meaningful work?
A nice resource for finding out whether a company has a good, positive work environment is www.CareerVote.com.
Posted by: bbrockit | February 16, 2009 at 12:07 PM
Be happy going to work.
See a comment from one of our bloggers.
Tips for a better Life. Makes one think.
http://jobs2ireland.com/jobs2ireland-blog/dell-to-cut-1900-jobs-a-bright-light-in-much-gloom/comment-page-1/#comment-68
Posted by: John | February 16, 2009 at 06:24 PM
Doing what I love has meant I am so much happier. I look forward to working. That's the way it should be!, Fleur
Posted by: Resume | March 03, 2009 at 08:42 PM
Great post! Some of you might find the following article I wrote on changing careers useful www.EzineArticles.com/?expert=Fleur_Wiig
Good luck! fleur
Posted by: Resume | March 03, 2009 at 08:48 PM
Nice post friend.. for a person to live stable meaningful to what he does is important rather salary plays second important role.
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Thats a nice resource. I think that would help me a lot.
Posted by: Resume Sample | May 12, 2009 at 03:50 AM
Nice post..
We should work in that environment where we love to work.
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Posted by: Account Deleted | March 08, 2010 at 11:34 PM
Hi;
little bit late in the party :)
well i just recently update win 7, and i also update driver on gt220 from 7.15 to 8.15. and now i experienced first glitch screen then black death screen.
i reboot my pc, this time it happens during welcome screen.
i again reboot my pc in safe mode and went to device manager and roll back the diplay driver.
it works fine but when i try to go in nvidia control panel. i get this message:
The NVIDIA Dispay Panel extension cannot be created.
Possible reason include:
Version mismatch. Reinstalling display drivers may solve this problem.
i have not yet try 8.16 & 9.1.
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This was a little hard for me to piece together. I apologize if I'm misunderstanding any of it.
Sex is a really touchy analogy. Lots of really smart people have gone on at great length about it as a root cause for various things. With the advantage of our current cultural fixation on it, it's not too hard to see that this is terribly wrong. Sex is rather empty and kind of difficult to even pull off without attraction. And attraction is an effect caused by a rather wholistic view of someone. No single value is enough to make you think "OMG, I want, let's run off and SPAWN together!" Sex is not a cause at all, it's the reaction to the effect of being attracted. The root cause is your understanding of the person you're attracted to.
The parallels you're drawing with fantasy make sense to me this way too. The reaction is the power creep. The reaction has to scale in some fashion we can understand based on the original input (not many people would buy a D&D expansion called The Penultimate Guide to Being the Untouchable Godly Overlord of All You Survey, not even if the package included a Hostess twinkie). The root causes are creative impulses and the desire to share them. The effect is the game. The cooperatively told story. Structuring within the story is used to help convey more accurately, to make them easier to understand. Roleplaying games have this in
common with other forms of storytelling. The rule sets, which are unique to gaming, are there to help share the storytelling, because the game master tells the overall story and narrates but the players all tell the story of their characters.
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"It's not undermining your ability to create sanity in your life"... I think that sounds a little conformist, doesn't it? I think that we all should try -at least- to get a job that gives us satisfaction.
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