The 5 Real Dangers Of Being In The Wrong Career:
1. 1. Being stuck forever
If there is one thing that’s very close to hell itself, it’s being stuck somewhere, especially when you don’t like the place you’ve been imprisoned in!
Why get stuck forever?
Consider this one word – inertia. That tendency of a moving body to remain in motion, and that tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest.
While at first, you only thought of slowing down towards your desired path, you fail to realize how you are also slowly being robbed of your momentum to reach your goals. Each day, when you decide to stay where you are, your inertia at rest becomes stronger. It gets harder and harder to move until one day, you’ve lost all desire to make that change in your life. You’re stuck forever!
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
2. 2. Wasting very precious time
Assuming you don’t get stuck forever, and that somewhere along those years, you’re able to break away from that wrong job that’s been your comfort zone, still you would have wasted very precious time along the way: time you could have spent doing what you love doing, time you could have spent enhancing your skills and your God-given gifts, and time you could have shared your passion with the world who needs it badly.
If there is one commodity in this life that’s so valuable, it would be TIME. You can’t turn back time. No matter how much money you possess, you can’t buy an extra hour of your life. In fact, we have no ability to predict how much time we’ve got left! Is anybody certain he’s going to wake up to another day? Is anybody certain he’s going to pursue his dreams tomorrow? Dreams he decided not to pursue today?
We don’t know how long we’d be able to live anyways, so if today is all you’ve got, how would you spend it? Would you RISK it that you have not been able to do the most important mission you were supposed to do? What legacy then are you going to leave behind?
Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
– Matthew 6:27, NIV
3. 3. Limited income
We often think that by doing other “income-generating” jobs in the meantime, we’d be able to earn enough money to someday afford us the “luxury” of being able to do our passion. But what we don’t realize is that while we keep on getting stuck with jobs we don’t like, we also limitour income potential. Why so? Because it is only by unleashing our full potentials (doing the jobs we LIKE) are we able to unleash unlimited returns from the world which benefits from the best of our true gifts!
“What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.”
-Julia Cameron
4. 4. Forgetting your gifts
As long as we neglect our gifts, we run the danger of forgetting them altogether sooner or later. Man is a creature of habit. And what habits are formed as long as we continue in careers we don’t like?
Let me give you an example. John has a passion for painting. His early school teachers noticed it in him even as a child. But his parents won’t approve of it. They wanted him to get a decent office job that earns him a stable income to raise a family. That’s what he did. At first, he thought he would just please his parents, and then later, still be able to practice his passion. But as the years went on, he found it more and more difficult to change paths. He got used to his daily routine of going to the office, looking forward to going home, and then entertaining himself by watching some tv when he got home. Everyday, he would drag himself to the office, do the minimum required of his job, and be content with the salary he got. At first he would remember how good he was at painting, but later on he starts to doubt himself. A few years more and his dreams would be nothing but distant illusions he couldn’t achieve anymore. Well, everybody else told him so, especially the people he worked with everyday.
5. 5. Losing your soul
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? – Mark 8:36-37, KJV
This is the greatest danger of being in the wrong job. This was also the reason why I had to finally let go of the job I had which didn’t resonate with my true passion.
I noticed that my soul was slowly dying. I didn’t like the person I was becoming, and I was getting worse every day. Even the people close to me are being affected. I easily got angry, because I was so frustrated with myself. I lost my patience quickly because I wasn’t satisfied with what I have. The material things I had were no longer enough to satisfy me, and I have so endangered my soul to get addicted to these things in increasing doses just so to find some fulfilment. In the end though, I knew I couldn’t find true meaning in all these things.
When we settle for a job we don’t like, we are rarely aware of how it could eventually change us within. We didn’t know that by trying to escape from our true passion, we are also escaping from who we really are. In effect, we are actually starting to live a LIE. And when we live a lie, all our other values start to crumble one by one. The first one is truth, the second is courage, the third is hope, and then joy and love. In the end, what will you have left with you?
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste,
it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference,
you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes,
your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
– Kahlil Gibran
