Is your job important?
More than salary, benefits, work environment or status, the ultimate factor in whether you enjoy going to work each day – I believe – is the value you place on the contribution of your work. It’s a matter of whether you, personally, feel your job is important.
I admit that’s a pretty broad measure. Few of us have jobs that the world would describe as intrinsically important. Certainly, emergency room doctors and airline pilots fall into that category, but job importance doesn’t necessarily involve making daily life-or-death decisions. In fact, job importance is largely a subjective affair. You could feel very important doing a job that the world largely ignores (say, being a clerk in a state motor vehicle department) or feel insignificant in a job that has high status, such as a dentist or a lawyer.
While status, money and power certainly don’t detract from the importance of a job, they don’t automatically bestow importance either. Most of us feel our jobs have meaning when the work we do taps into one of our core values or produces a positive reaction that gives us a feeling of physical pleasure. I’m not talking sex, here. What I had in mind is the head-to-toe joy you feel when you hear a baby’s first words or the heart-pounding elation of seeing the underdog team win a tight game.
Many of us – the lucky ones – have jobs that produce such feelings. Teachers, for example, get tremendous satisfaction when they see a look in their students’ eyes acknowledging that they understand the lesson. Knowing they have succeeded in doing something important – passing along knowledge to another generation – provides teachers with tremendous satisfaction.
Importance can come in any variety of ways. People whose job it is to supply parts to others in a manufacturing process, for example, might feel their job is extremely important in the smooth running of a plant. A toll booth collector who believes that making change quickly and speeding drivers through the gate helps improve the quality of urban life to some degree also feels that what he is doing is important.
The trick in finding a job that is satisfying is to find one that lets you engage your values. If you believe that helping people is important, a great job would be one that involves lots of hands-on work solving people’s problems. If you’re such a person, working in a job that involves things rather than people – say record-keeping or accounting – might pay the bills, but would probably seem meaningless and unimportant. Conversely, if you believe in the importance of getting the right answers and making sure things add up, an accounting job would be heaven, while tackling an endless stream of people’s complaints would seem utterly pointless.
The ideal job, therefore, is not so much one with the best pay or the nicest surroundings, but the one that requires you to do those tasks that you intrinsically believe are important. Before you look for your next job, look into your own values first. When you identify the core beliefs you feel passionate about, you’ll have a clearer idea of what to look for.
Article – Copyright 2001 Evan Cooper. Syndicated by ParadigmTSA
