How to choose your Career?
The elephant in the room is Monetary Compensation and it certainly does play a huge role in choosing your career. Excuse me for being philosophical in a worldly matter but if I were to ask anyone why you want a good monetary compensation, what will your answer be? I guess, everyone would say to have a better house, a better car, or whatever you deem as your dream. The other side could be you might have responsibilities to fulfill for your family. Now imagine a scenario where you have everything in the world you want, would you still do the same job? If the answer is no, then you are trapped in an endless cycle of misery that will suck the life out of you. Now here comes the motivation shot to leave your job and do what you believe in which is the new sexy entrepreneurship. Actually, my belief is quite the contrary from a few recent developments.
Choose the process, not the results.
I challenge you if there is an individual out there that can tell you how to earn money, then I’ll invest all of my money there. There is no definitive way to earn money and no human has cracked the code up till now. All these self-help books tell you how people lose money but not how they earned it. So lets keep money out of the debate here.
If I were to say that I’m offering you a job where you’ll get a handsome sum of money, a beautiful car, and a luxurious home but the work is the antithesis of who you are as a person and what you imagine to do for a living. Would you take the Job? If you do take the plunge, you perform well on the job but I can bet you on this, that you would be miserable. A prudent guess is that 30% of your lifetime is work and imagine doing what you hate for that prolonged period of time.
And I can probably guess that you won’t perform well or you won’t have growth. Why? When does a boxer or a fighter in the ring lose? Where one fighter decides to call it a day. The winner is not the one who punches the most but the one who can take the most punches. It's a game of endurance. Even if you choose a career where you love what you’re doing, it won’t be a smooth ride but you won’t leave the ring because of a few bad days.
Choose the process and not the results. Put yourself in a place of a recruiter and imagine your hiring a chef in a hotel. There are two candidates in front of you, one has all the degrees and certifications that you can imagine for being the perfect chef and the other doesn’t have good qualifications despite cooks very good and keeps experimenting. Who would you hire? The one who cooks well or the one who has qualifications?
Now let's see how their career path rolls down. The qualified guy lands a good job in a huge organization. The guy who cooks well doesn’t get an opportunity through the screening process of any huge organization. Eventually, he takes a low-paying job in a local eatery. Which individual would give year-on-year growth to the organization? If a local eatery gets hand such a gem then obviously he would be creating an enormous amount of value which would turn out to show year-on-year growth. Down the line, there would be a realization that a qualification guy doesn’t add value but keeps everything afloat. Turns out, the individual with no qualifications has made the local eatery a success, and there are many investors waiting to invest in his own restaurant.
The crux of the story is that if you love the process then you eventually create value and value has its own fanbase. Aim for creating value and the rest will follow. Wealth follows value and nothing else. It might sound very rudimentary but creating value isn’t a game of a few days. It takes consistency and resilience. Nikki Lauda, an F1 racer had a net worth of $200 million during his racing career. Gordan Ramsay has a net worth of $63 Million. Nikki in layman's terms is a good driver and Gordan is a chef. Should you follow the results they achieved? I guess they never imagined being that wealthy but they were in the game for the game. Do what you do best and forget about money, it will follow.