Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life

British employees will averagely work for 34 hours and 26 minutes a week, adding up to a total of 1,795 hours a year, and 84,365 hours over a lifetime. That is a great deal of time to be doing something you may not like much, or towards which you feel indifferent. So seeking out a job which combines the things we love to do and which motivate us is certainly worth doing.

Confucius offers great advice but of course it’s not always that simple and it can be both difficult to figure out what we actually love and how that might translate into a viable job and career that pays the bills. And there will of course be times when that may have to take priority! Yet in this National Careers Week, it seems a worthwhile enterprise and one that we and our young people need to consider.

So first, what is it that we love and inspires us? Philosopher Alain de Botton writes that the clues to our true passions often lie in looking back to our childhood where they may be visible in embryonic form.

I can certainly see this in my own children, so that the young dinosaur enthusiast has become a research scientist; the computer game enthusiast works at creating 3d computer simulations; the enthusiastic young musician continues to be an older enthusiastic musician. Therefore looking at where our motivations lie and where they intersect with our strengths and competencies can lead in the right direction.

Of course not all of us will find such obvious clues to where our futures might lie and indeed many of the jobs our young people might do in the future may not yet even exist, such is the pace of change. To those I would say in the words of Socrates to ‘know thyself’. Knowing your personality type will enable an individual to seek work environments in which they may best flourish.

We all hope that our young people will find a job that they love, although it may be that the love of a job emerges in the way in which we engage with it and in the work place relationships which are formed.

Of one thing we can be certain, although it may be tempting to encourage our children down certain paths, we must always be mindful they are not our own unlived lives. We should perhaps be getting on with those ourselves!

Mrs Crossley