It doesn’t have the highest salary. It doesn’t have the fanciest title. It doesn’t give you a team of 100 people reporting to you. It doesn’t have a clear path to promotion.
It’s where you have the most leverage.
It’s the job that allows you to take who you are right now – your skills, your passions, your knowledge, your relationships – and use them to greatest effect.
Which means of course that the perfect job is the perfect job for YOU, right now, at this moment in your life. It might be a dud for someone else. And someone else’s dream job might be worthless to you.
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Are you sure? Here is what I think. The perfect job doesn’t exist for 90% of the populations just as the perfect mate doesn’t exist for most people. Some jobs are a better fit for skill sets and interests, other jobs are just bad fits. The 10% of people who have the “perfect” job write and talk about it extensively while everyone else is wondering why it hasn’t happened to them yet.
Even the best jobs have elements to them that make them difficult – some people are better suited to embracing those challenges and can be happy doing so. Others are optimistic by nature and draw on the best of their work when discussing it which may present a false impression of the perfect fit.
Isn’t it better to look for jobs based upon alignment of skills and interest and level of challenge rather than romanticizing something that may never happen?
Or is my thinking too old-school in the marketplace of 2009?
Jennifer, thank you so much for your comment. I have no idea for how many people the perfect job or perfect mate exists.
What I do think is that it’s a lot less likely we’ll find what’s “perfect” (or, more likely, what’s a step closer to perfect) if we don’t know what to look for.