Leave your job for a career
Do you have a career? Or just a job? A lot of people don’t think about it. When asked what they do, they will say ‘I’m … an insurance adjuster, a computer programmer, a whatever. With the exception of those rare few of us who have always dreamed of being something specific, many of us just fell into something and ended up with a job rather than a career.
What’s the difference? Well, in a recent article called A Guide to Quitting Your Job (no I don’t have any plans right now guys (not yet at least), just reading widely 
), John Wesley of Pick the Brain wrote:
A job is just work. You might like it, you might not, but you do it for the money and it has no connection to your personal identity. If you lost your job, you might be upset but you’d get over it when you found a replacement.
A career is inseparable from who you are and who you want to be. A person with a job is collecting a paycheck. A person with a career is working towards a dream.
For those people who identify that they have a job and not a career, and want a career instead of just a job, he identifies two major steps to take care of before making the leap out of your job:
- Identify the career you want by following your passion. By this he means “finding the place where your passions and aptitudes intersect with valuable labor” to identify a career that is both personally satisfying and valuable to others.
- Build your resume and network. The way to do this is to do things that prove your ability and commitment and then share them with others who have an interest so you can build valuable relationships.
He closes with an important thought:
Your work shouldn’t be something you tolerate. It should be something that drives you — to become the person you should be, to give everything you can.
