What's Important to Me

Did you know that the average person spends about 10 years of their life working?

That’s what Google says, anyways. If you think about it, that’s just an average number that probably includes a lot of people who don’t work at all. With this information, I have deduced that someone like myself, with a university education, in a developed country, with plenty of resources and job opportunities, will probably spend somewhere close to 12 years of my life working.

Wow.

I’m thinking to myself that this is a lot of time to spend doing something that I don’t like. I believe that life is something we are given to enjoy and our only job is to contribute to everyone’s happiness, including our own. Finding a job and working for about 12 years of our lives can help us accomplish these two main goals. First, find a job you like; find one that makes you feel valued and like you are part of an organization or community. This is an integral part of finding your own happiness. Second, many of us in the West have the power to help others in the world find happiness. Performing our daily jobs tasks may only be a teeny, tiny piece of the puzzle but why do you think there are seven billion other people on the planet?

There are many different ways you can look at the world but I will forever be an optimist. Your full-time job may be to sell clothing and this may make you happy because you enjoy fashion and trends. Your happiness – check! But this job will play, perhaps, just a small part in making someone else happy. Everyday, you sell clothes to people who, maybe just for an instant, feel better about themselves. Maybe they feel stylish in the shirt you sold them; maybe that shirt won’t give the bullies at school anything to laugh about; or maybe they finally saved up every penny they owned to buy that shirt and they won’t be cold tonight because you sold it to them. Contribute to someone else’s happiness – check! In every job you do, you have the opportunity to be part of someone’s happiness. It is important to me that everyone finds this opportunity and sees the “big picture.”

I have had moments in my life where I thought, life is meant to enjoy and work is simply imposed by society as “what must be done.” I remember thinking, do I really need to work? I could simply make enough money to fly down to Jamaica and live off the earth for the rest of my life. But that wouldn’t be enough.

So this is when it hit me that, that is why so many people work. If we were fortunate enough to be put on this earth with all of these tools to make ourselves happy, why not use them to help make others happy, too? Part-time jobs, careers, professions – these are all ways to help us reach the two main goals in life, a) be happy and, b) help make others happy. This is why you need to like what you do. Just use these two goals to guide you and you can’t go wrong. If you could do that, I would really appreciate it.