Career Guidance & Rediscovering Your Childlike Wonder
When I look at how the landscape of work and what it means to be successful has changed in recent years, I wonder if all this time we’ve been doing it wrong. In school they told us to stop doodling, stop daydreaming, stop acting the class clown, stop answering back, stop looking out the window and letting our minds drift ever-so-slightly from the text book in front of us. But the pandemic and the dramatically-increased free time it comes with has forced many of us back into that childlike sense of wonder, the kind we tend to lose when life and career guidance and the need to make money send us down the wrong path.
It is this childlike wonder that leads us back to once abandoned passions, and often those passions come to life in the form of small businesses and side-hustles. There is a shift happening now in the traditions of how we make a living. There’s Instagram and Patreon and Twitch and people assembling on Reddit threads to shake up the hedge funds of long-standing billionaires. In the wake of these things, we no longer rely so relentlessly on large corporations and the “good pensionable jobs” they offer, and it’s important that career guidance evolves to reflect this. There is nothing wrong with any career path we may take, whether it’s mainstream or not, but the problem is this: If we are passionate about numbers, we are encouraged to be accountants. If we are passionate about music or art, we are encouraged to have a back up plan.
All the while there is evidence to support that choosing the path of music or art or any other off-beat career that lights a fire under you, can really pay off.
The Doodler
In school I never had the hand or eye for art, but even so I knew that it was not always taken seriously as a realistic career choice. The artists were the idealists, no doubt talented and encouraged but always brought back down to earth with the push to aim for a “real job.” But this notion was disputed last Christmas when my Instagram feed was flooded — in a good way — with people selling their original art. Every scroll gave way to more watercolor nudes, pet portraits, hopeful sunsets and sketches of much-missed pubs and businesses. It seemed that before December there were artists already fully booked and closing their commissions for the season, and that more than ever before people were giving & receiving the gift of art.
The Talker
Back in the early noughties the “audioblog” came onto the internet scene. Not quite journalistic interview and not quite radio chitchat, these long-form conversations evolved into what we now know as podcasts. These days it seems as though everyone and their granny has a podcast, and with the scope of money that can be made from them through sponsorship and Patreon subscriptions, it’s no wonder why. From the resurfacing of dormant crime investigations and conversations with your favourite celebrities, to virtual book clubs and tips on how to optimize your life and health, there’s a podcast out their for everyone. Though we may have been told otherwise in school and scolded for speaking out of turn, it pays to be a talker.
The Class Clown
We turn to comedy in times of distress and uncertainty, and thankfully now, we are absolutely spoilt for comedic content. Comedy can come in many forms: stand-up specials, TV shows, movies, Youtube channels, podcasts… the list is endless. We all love to (and need to) laugh, and to be the person capable of making others laugh is a powerful gift. The ability to derail a lesson with quick wit and launch a room into a fit of laughter is perhaps a strength to be nurtured instead of a character defect to be silenced, especially if it can be later transformed into a career in comedy. Youtube star and famous prankster ‘RossCreations’ makes a living by doing things like serving people mashed potato on cones in the guise of ice-cream and sneaking hotdogs into peoples pockets, and these fun daily escapades with his friends have earned him a net worth of $1.3M.
The Gamer
Last year, Call of Duty: Warzone was launched at an almost suspiciously close time to the start of a pandemic that forced us all indoors. Many people took to their XBOX’s and PS4’s and spent long hours on the virtual battlefield, shouting profanities at friends and strangers through muffled headphones. Some people took it to the next level and started streaming their games on platforms like Twitch, which allows gamers to earn money while they play. Though the platform has been around since 2011, the growth of the internet since then and more recently the pandemic, has caused it to blow up. Last year, gamer ‘Nickmercs’ made almost $2M from live streaming through the platform, with many others alongside him cashing in similar amounts. Perhaps inside a virtual game isn’t the smartest way to spend all your time, however if you can incorporate into your life in a balanced way and if your skillset allows, there is money to be made and career fulfillment to be found here.
There are plenty more careers that are finding their place in society despite being viewed as inaccessible to most or unlikely to succeed in. There’s music, writing, performance arts, poetry, athleticism, tattooing, photography… I could go on and on. There is the question, of course, of sustainability in these non-mainstream careers. We are a society that have come from much economic turmoil and so safety and security on the job front is a fair consideration when it comes to deciding what we want to be, and no one should feel guilty for prioritizing those things. It is for this reason too that when we do find ourselves on a path that does not align with our true passion, the fault does not lie solely on career guidance councelors or on the schools themselves, but rather on the system in which the notion of a traditional job is so deep-rooted. But this career shift is happening on such a wide scale that we can only hope and believe that the powers that be will move with it, and that soon these “non-mainstream” careers will be as encouraged, supported, and normalised as their more traditional counterparts.
I’m not saying you should quit your medical degree to make funny videos on the internet, or give up your career in software development to draw pictures all day. Passions come in many, many forms, and the main takeaway from this is to follow yours, whatever it may be, and to know that our society is slowing evolving into one that will potentially allow that passion to become the very thing you need to build a happy, successful life.
Originally published at https://www.aoifechaney.com on February 8, 2021.
