What if Your Dream Job Was Never the Prize?

Unplash photo by Hugo Ruiz

Get internships. Check. 

Graduate. Check. 

Network. Check.

Land your dream job. Check?

That was the plan. That is the plan. That’s what we tell ourselves on the pre-constructed path to success. 

We’ve spent a good part of our lives telling well-intentioned teachers and relatives who ask what we want to be when we’re grown. That’s what we’re groomed, expected and rewarded to do. To chase what we want to be rather than who we want to become. 

Moving through life we have little wiggle room to explore those human-centered questions that give us space and permission to pause and ask. Sometimes circumstances won’t allow it. Other times we don’t know how to sit with ourselves and explore what could be. 

Does this career align with my values? Align with who I want to become? The qualities I want to possess? 

These feel like the better questions. The richer and more nuanced questions. And now that I’ve lived some life and seen some things, I reflect on these questions with a grounded perspective of myself, others and the world around me.

I’ve come to realize my dream isn’t my job. And that’s OK.

I’m in my grown woman era. I can do (almost) whatever I want when my body cooperates. IYKYK. At my big age there’s peace and calm in coming back to the basics of who I want to become rather than what I want to be. Yes, there are times and seasons when our lives feel centered around work. I know what it’s like to couple your dream, job, and identity so tightly together that you no longer feel like the main character in your own life story. You lose yourself. 

Don’t let social fool you or have you believing the job is the prize. YOU are. The job isn't the highlight reel or the pithy lessons learned. It’s the indecisions, the delayed gratification, the yeses and noes, joy and pain (sunshine and rain). It’s digging deeper to uncover the layers and nuances that weren’t included in the initial job description. In the best of situations, you discover yourself in the process. You continue becoming. 

Who I want to become has helped me make major life decisions, like where I want to live, how I spend my valuable discretionary time and what communities I want to be a part of and do life with. 

What if the job is a means rather than an end? What if the job is your training ground — part of your growth and opportunity to have an impact? It’s the weighty unknowns that we won’t always know up front but must wade through: length of stay at the job assignment and scope of that training opportunity. 

I thank God for the mentors, wise counsel and deep knowings He reveals in pieces to help me know what’s actually for me, for my good and for His glory. Like knowing when to stay, pass or even leave. Wisdom shows you, sometimes in unlikely and unexpected circumstances.

When I'm awaiting that clarity, I do as much good as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. 

The prize is you. Arriving to this truth has been a journey — more than 20 years in the making. I’m still traveling on this road of realization, evolving, growing and becoming a version of myself that I like and cherish. A self that makes me smile because I know my story and God-given purpose. 

What I value and where I’m drawn to in peace are guiding compasses for me. They keep me grounded, which I need. WE need. Because when we aren’t rooted in something, it’s easy to be uprooted by anything. 

For my ambitious girlies, I can hear our collective to-do lists, goals and career plans crying out in opposition. The truth is you are no less ambitious for reevaluating what you value and how that shapes the way you live and move. 

It means what you truly value is greater than centering things, titles or someone else’s dream. And that is the true prize.

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Questions to consider: What might happen if you took the job out of the center and began to plan a life? What might that look like in practice? A job can come and go, but your purpose will remain.