A Job I Love? by Brandon Ebah Oben

Confucius was the Chinese philosopher who said, “choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

When I first read it, it sounded really appealing but when I gave it a second critical thought, I had some questions for Confucius.

How do I know a job I love? Are we going to know the job we love by some kind of revelation? How do you practically explain that to a high school student who hasn’t found what to do with their life yet?

In order to love a job, we need to first of all be introduced to it. Stay in the job for some considerable amount of time, and only then can we claim to either love or hate the job.

Jacqueline was a young lady I met in the city of Dschang, in the West Region of Cameroon, who told us she had to change her career from Midwifery to Medical Laboratory Technology after witnessing a child-bearing experience at the Maternity during her first clinical internship. She felt so uncomfortable witnessing childbirth although she is a woman called to someday go through the same experience.

Jacqueline is an example of someone who did not thoroughly research the job before going into it. Luckily for her, she was able to switch careers early enough. Her story is similar to many who lose faith in a particular career because they didn’t research the job well enough.

Researching the job doesn’t only mean you should browse it on a search engine, it also mean you should try and spend a day or two at the job site and do a self examination of if this is what you want to do for 20 to 30 years of your life.

While Confucius was right to say a job you love doesn’t really feel like work, finding your “love-job” is not something you discover taking those Algebra or Balancing equation classes. As Celeste Headlee rightly puts it, finding a job is like dating, it takes time and lots of experiments.