Is There Such A Thing As The Perfect Job?

If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

This is a famous line that has been credited to Mark Anthony and numerous others. Regardless of who said it, I believe in it. I’ve been a?customer service expert?since I started my career just out of college, and I love what I do. As I look back, I can pinpoint exactly when I knew that customer service was important to me. More on that in a moment.

The sad thing is that I’ve seen people who hate their jobs versus others who love their careers. Perhaps that’s a good way to look at it, a job versus a career. A job is working for money. A career is a lifetime endeavor, ideally something you enjoy and are passionate about.

I Googled “job versus career” and found some interesting definitions and descriptions. One I particularly liked came from?Officevibe?and said, “Jobs give you paychecks. Careers give you experience.”

I’m not suggesting that if your passion isn’t in alignment with your job, you quit. You still need to eat. However, if you can find a way to do what you love, even just 10-20% of the time, you’ll find immense fulfillment in your job, which will start to look more like a career. For example, Google provides its engineers the opportunity to take approximately one day of the week to focus on a company project of their own design. Google knows that people will be more productive when they’re working on something they are personally devoted to.

The point is that if even a small part of what you love to do is in your job, you’ll be far happier than those just working for a paycheck, not really enjoying what they do.

Some people are very lucky and find what they want to do early in life—sometimes as children. For example, as a little girl my daughter always loved to cook, and now she works for a famous chef in New York. And my son started playing guitar when he was not yet a teenager and today is a recording artist in Nashville. A friend of mine loved working on cars as a teenager. Today he buys and sells exotic cars.

I was young when I developed my passion for customer service. I had no idea that one day I would be traveling the world to work with clients on their customer service strategies. I can trace the beginning of this interest to my first business, when I was just 12 years old and started a birthday party magic show business.

My parents taught me some valuable lessons, which included showing up on time, saying thank you, following up to get feedback, and more. These are the tenets of good customer service in most businesses. They’re common sense. And while they were important lessons, I don’t think it was what fueled my true passion for creating a career in customer service and CX.

That moment came about eight years later when I was in college and working part-time at a gas station. It was a self-service gas station where we collected the customer’s money outside at the pump. The technology to pay at the pump with a credit card was still too new and expensive for our station.

On the coldest day of the year (-8 degrees Fahrenheit), an elderly customer drove in. I offered to pump her gas so she wouldn’t have to get out of the car. After she paid, I went inside where my manager was waiting. He yelled at me for pumping her gas. I argued that the lady, who was one of our regular customers, was at least 80, and it seemed like the nice—and right—thing to do.

He said, “Now she’s going to expect that the next time she comes back.”

I replied, “I hope she does come back instead of going to the two gas stations across the street.” He glared at me and stormed out of the building.

I knew I was right. And, I liked the way it felt. Furthermore, I helped elderly people pump their gas for the rest of the day.

I didn’t know it back then, but that was a defining moment. It fueled my desire to take care of customers in the several jobs I had from that point on, until I eventually decided, less than a year out of college, to become a?customer service keynote speaker?and travel the world teaching people how to create a better customer experience.

If you look back at your personal and work history, there is often something that happened that defined the course of your work. For some, it was the first job they took out of school. Ideally, they enjoyed that job that would define their career, but for some, it was just a means to an end, making a living to take care of themselves and their loved ones.

Maybe you were fortunate enough at a young age to find your passion and turn it into a career. But even years into your professional work life, you can find your passion and discover what you love to do. It can come at any moment. The key is to recognize it, take advantage of that insight and find a way to work it into what you do, or ideally, replace what you do.

And when you do that, you may have found your perfect job!

Follow me on?Twitter.?Check out?my?website.?

Shep Hyken?is a customer service and customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times, bestselling business author.?For information on Shep's virtual?training programs, go to?www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow him on?Twitter.?

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Check out Shep's latest research in his?Achieving Customer Amazement Study.