Posted by: Alena | March 21, 2010

An “easy” job vs doing what you love

My sister told me today, that she decided to switch careers from Software Development to Software Testing. She feels she is not good enough as a programmer, and she doesn’t think she will ever become a great one. So she decided to become a tester instead.
My sister has never tried working as a tester, but she thinks testing is much easier than the job of a developer: you don’t need to come up with innovative ways to solve complex problems, you just test what someone else has written – an easy and safe job (so she thinks).

I’m not going to argue whether testing is really easier than programming or not.
That’s not the point.
The point is that the entire idea of looking for an “easy” job is wrong.
If you love what you’re currently doing, but you feel that you are not great at it, then keep doing it and eventually you’ll become great! Everyone starts with little knowledge and then grows into an expert.
If you feel that you don’t have enough skills, or knowledge, or experience – you can get them! Read books, tutorials, articles. Practice. Ask for help.
And eventually you’ll get there!

But if you feel that you’ve chosen the wrong career – you should start looking for something you’d really love to do, something that excites you, something you feel drawn to. Not for something that just seems easy.
What would you like to do, if you were a millionaire and didn’t have to work? What would you do for free?
An “easy” job will never be easy, if it doesn’t excite you, doesn’t challenge you, and doesn’t help you grow. It will be a boring routine, and you’ll hate it.
And our world doesn’t need any more people who hate what they do :)

And as a bonus, a great video by Gary Vaynerchuk: Do what you love (no excuses!).
“There is way too many people … that are doing stuff they hate. Please stop doing that!”

Advertisement

Responses

  1. Couldn’t agree more. I just posted a similar entry to my blog yesterday!

  2. Completely agree with you. Though sometimes its not easy to find something you would be happy to do for the rest of your life…

    • Hanna, it doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life.
      Just pick something you feel drawn to at the moment and explore it.
      Your interests might change with time, but that’s ok.

  3. OR…you could have both. You could be Great at an Easy job.

    What I’ve found is that I tend to make things more difficult for myself than they have to be.

    I’m a software developer, and for the past few months I’m been creatively giving myself the title of Ease Worker.

    Whatever comes up that I have to do, or choose to do, or assigned to do, I’ve decided that I am fully capable of doing it, and I can do it with ease and enjoy myself at the same time.

    It working! – Best “solution” I ever came up with!


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Categories

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.