The Myth of the Dream Job

Remember when you were a kid, and grown-ups would ask you what you wanted to be when you grew up? As a small child, you would give answers like, "I want to be a professional football player!", or "I want to be a ballet dancer!", or as my son said at his kindergarten completion ceremony, "I want to be a professional wrestler!". The years had a way of paring us down, understanding our physical and mental giftedness, and our aspirations for our jobs became less clear. Upon completing our high school or even collegiate education, many of us wondered, "What now?"

Somewhere along the line an insidious idea has worked its way into the zeitgeist of career planning: the dream job. It is no longer good enough to "just" have a job. It must fulfil, empower, proscribe, and define us. It's the YOLO of vocational existential angst, and I think it is complete rubbish.

The irony of my statement is that I have a job I absolutely love in a location I have dreamed of living. It is a superb fit with my skill set, is challenging, and I work with world-class talent on a problem statement that is often at odd with physics. It is something I am thankful to have found. But it is not my dream job. Because I don't have a dream job.

Tere are two primary reasons for this. One, once you get into the vagaries of actually performing your "dream job", there will be days of tedium. There will be interpersonal conflicts. There will be numerous plans that do not close and require recovery. It will be hard. The second is that my dreams are only related to vocation in a tangential manner. Yes, my job will affect my dreams in some way, but they are not part and parcel of what I dream of.

Allow me to flesh this out more fully. One of the most important things I tell someone who asks me for career advice or whom I am mentoring is this: Focus on who want to be rather than what you want to do. Often, this is the first time the person has heard this. What I mean by this is that we should know ourselves and the character and engagement with the world we want to embody. We have been blessed by our Creator with a life and we owe something in return. Our gifts are just those, gifts. We ought not squander them on just pursuing something as pedestrian as a job title.

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.” ~C.S. Lewis

When we consider and construct the idea of who we are and who we want to be in the world, our language changes. This orients us toward work as an aspect of who we are and then every job can be a dream job because we choose to let our work be an outworking of who we are. We can be a blessing to those around us. We can add every experience to the strata of our skill stack and become a unique contribution to any employer who we choose to join. Our job should align with our values and add a few more layers to the complex equation every individual is.