How To Find The Perfect Job

Adults will spend half of their waking lives working so you better make sure your making the right choice.

Make the wrong choice and it will effect you negatively in almost every way imaginable.

Most of us upon graduating school immediately enter the work force with the unbridled enthusiasm only a student who has never endured the monotony of an unfulfilling 9–5 can have.

Everything seems great at first, you finally landed a full time job and are getting much bigger paychecks than what you are used to working part time at Dairy Queen. Then 6 months or a couple years pass by and you start thinking is this really it?

Your colleagues once seemingly humorous attitudes are now just annoying and those paychecks don’t seem so significant now that you have to pay for your own place and groceries. You haven’t learned anything new since your first month and your starting to suspect that increasing your sales number by 20% from last year isn’t exactly going to have a big impact on anything you deem truly important.

Let’s look at the four things you should check for in a job to make sure it won’t leave you miserable and just counting down the hours everyday.

Money

Yes of course every job will pay you money but if it doesn’t provide you with noticeable raises every year you should start looking else where.

I started teaching English online in 2019 by 2023 I was making the exact same amount, well actually less when accounting for inflation.

Even though I had become a better teacher and was receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback my pay had stayed the same with no increase in sight.

It was very disheartening when I realized I could be the greatest teacher on planet earth and I would receive the same pay as someone scrolling Instagram during lessons. Okay I admit it I did that a few times but still the point remains.

Don’t stay in a job where a top performer receives the same pay as the bottom performer or where there isn’t a clear structure on how your salary will increase as you become more valuable.

If you are making more money for your company shouldn’t you be making more money to?

Impact

We all want to make a difference in the world no matter if it is big or small. It feels good to know we have a positive impact on our environment and people around us.

To know we are changing something for the better is an innate desire for humans.

Making an impact can mean something different to everyone. Whether it’s a teacher who sees that struggling student start to understand a difficult concept or a writer who sees their article finally got more than 1 view. (I’m definitely not referring to myself here.)

Different people will find different things meaningful and that’s perfectly normal. Just make sure whatever job you choose aligns with your values and has what you think is a meaningful impact.

You will have much more energy throughout the day and leave work feeling satisfied as opposed to drained.

Learning New Skills

If your job is not consistently teaching you new skills it is time to move on.

Not only will you become tremendously bored because nothing new is being introduced and it is human nature to want to learn and experience new things.

You are also losing money, having less of an impact and will not be having as much fun.

The more skills you have the more money you will be capable of making.

The more skills you have the more enjoyment you will get out of work. If you played basketball but couldn’t even make a lay up that wouldn’t be very fun but if you had the ability to land 3’s at will like Steph Curry suddenly it would become your favorite thing. Humans LOVE being skilled at something.

It is very hard to make the world a better place if you can’t even make yourself better first.

Gives you joy

How can we be truly happy if the place where we spend half of our lives doesn’t give us joy?

If your work drains you, you will end up draining everybody around you.

I once had the unfortunate pleasure of working a brief stint in a chemical factory. One thing I immediately noticed was the zombie like expression of practically everybody working there. When work ended their expressions didn’t seem to change much and understandably so, we all knew we would be back mindlessly toiling in the factory the next day.

I tried to enjoy my time outside of work but it is hard to enjoy life when you subconsciously are calculating how long it is before you inevitably have to go back to your soul sucking shift of putting holes in the same bottle for 8 hours.

Life should not be spent counting down the minutes and hours before you have to return to some place that you dread.

If you do not get joy out of your work it will inevitably drain the joy out of all the other aspects of your life. It will cause a negative impact not only on you but on all of your relationships and activities outside of work as well.

This will result in a very dangerous downward spiral where work makes you unhappy and will bleed into every other aspect of your life. From not being able to enjoy your favorite TV show, to being grumpy when spending time with your significant other.

If your job does nothing but suck the joy out of your life it’s time to move on no matter how good the pay is.

Finding the perfect job is certainly no easy task and usually takes some trial and error but knowing the key elements to look for in a job can help us tremendously on our job search. If it has all of these four elements in the right amount that suits you personally you will be much more satisfied at work and in the rest of your life.