Working Towards Changing Your Life & Career
Clay at The Growing Life wrote an article about productivity that is more centred around people than businesses and corporates.
Its a topic close to my heart and one that is part of many people’s midlife decisions. Many individuals at midlife decide that their inefficient and corrupt corporates are not great places to work, nor were they meant to give the best years of their lives to them just for a corporate salary package and a few transient perks.
So I have started a new category today from this posting that will build into a new area that I know is another part of the midlife challenge and crisis that many have. I have combined career change with lifestyle change because if you don’t change your lifestyle as part of your career change you have missed a great and important opportunity.
I have been in the Internet industry for fourteen years now. I remember when it was novel seeing an article in the newspaper about the Internet. Ironically, it is now novel again to see an article about the Internet because it is so ubiquitous to people’s lives. The importance of it, along with a few other tech things like mobile phones is that, given the right control and management these tools will enable you to create a new living and also a new way of living that will be far more natural than the corporate Victorian existence many of us are well used to.
So choosing a new career, and taking into consideration not only new technology but alternative ways of living that can come from new technology as well as simply thinking differently, is a great opportunity for you at midlife.
Choosing a new career or leaving your old job to start a new business is a big event which can be one of the biggest challenges of your life. Choosing the way you live is as important and can be integrated into the new career as a fundamental part of it. For example, I recall on a recent holiday to Cyprus seeing a man who would appear from one corner of the village I stayed at to sit by the local bar, open his laptop and connect to the wireless network of the bar. He would sit, type and sip for half an hour and then be off, laptop in rucksack.
It turned out the guy lived in a bus near the village a few hundred yards from the beach. I don’t know what he did for a living but I got the impression much was done via the laptop and then uploaded to the Internet on a frequent basis. He had created a lifestyle around his work-style, or was it the other way around? he had created a work-style around the lifestyle he wanted.
Contrast this to a dull day in the winter of a northern European or American day in a city. Millions of us travel for hours to work in crowded conditions to then work alongside others who are equally frustrated at having to travel and spend so much money doing so, only to get the salary to pay the bills we don’t feel any fulfilment in paying. Compare that to this guy; he has no need for heating bills, he sits under shade when it is hot, goes for a swim when he wants to. Lives off of fruit and vegetables that keep him healthy. He also doesn’t need to bust his butt working long hours to make enough money just to survive. I want to think about those last words for a moment. “Just to survive”. That’s what it feels like for many people. Paying bills for heating and electricity, tv, insurance & house loans or rent, just to survive.
Why not consider a skill you have that could give you a modest income and find somewhere you could live that required little monetary challenge?
I spent years trying to work out what I really wanted to do with my life. It came my permanent thought process for everything I looked at and interacted with. I read books and even read books of lists of careers to find something that met all my needs.
I was so frustrated with the corruption and negligence in the corporate I was working in (in the telco industry) that I wrote 90,000 words of a book I never completed to possibly get published. It was therapy in its own right.
Choosing what is right for you is not easy but starts by taking a review of who you really are, stripping away at the scales you have built up over you over the years to understand who you really are and what really excites you. What were you born to be?
At midlife, as part of a crisis and after a long term relationship separation and divorce, there is a time when you think to yourself, ‘what now?’
That is the time to think to yourself, ‘what was I born to be on this earth?’ its not meant to be a religious calling, it is meant to trigger within you a desire to understand what really excites you, and no, I don’t accept any corporate job as being the thing that really does that. A corporate job is just a mask that gives some reward and satisfaction and maybe hints at what you really have a passion for that makes your life unique and worth living.
I will begin to write more about this category over time but for now, back to Clay at the Growing Life.
Clay has written an article that proposes a new manifesto for living and working. Go check it out and please let me know what you think right here.
Soon I will tell you about the man from Thailand I met on the beach one day and how I think he has got it made.
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Filed under: Life-Style Change
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAt midlife, as part of a crisis and after a long term relationship separation and divorce, there is a time when you think to yourself, ‘what now?’ That is the time to think to yourself, ‘what was I born to be on this earth? … [...]