Don't be idle, just jump!

I thought I was prepared. I really thought I had nothing to worry about and that all the pieces would fall into place pretty quickly soon after my graduation. A job would be found and I would move there to take another step on my path, and then another to bring about positive change in the world. Sound a bit naive to you? Well, it certainly does to me now. Not the part about worrying, because I believe it is not a good use of anybody's energy to worry too much, but the part about the job finding. It is NOT something that is just found. It is something one needs to go and look for, do research about, get to know people and most importantly apply for. If like me you have not already been working in the field you would like to dedicate yourself to, then you need to find and entrance, a starting point. And this is not an easy task.

Over on my other blog I wrote about my jobsearch and the lack of inspiration that I face now that I got out of university. Here I would like to add a second aspect. The aspect of not-knowing-what-to-do. This is different from not-knowing-what-you-want, which is one more difficulty.

Not knowing what to do is about the insecurity what your next step should be, and the cocktail of fear, self-doubt, anger, and frustration that inevitably starts brewing the longer you sit around without getting active. It catches me while looking at job listings. They never describe what you expect your dream job to be, because dream jobs are not advertised to individuals. It's a personal affair to define what your dream is. Mostly you would not even recognize your dream job in a paper, if you saw it broken down into qualification requirements and tasks. So what is one to do. "Jump in", everybody says. "You will only know later if it is what you wanted." And so I sit here again, idly looking around, losing and gaining a little bit of inspiration left and right and wishing I was more of a machine that could mechanically do the necessary.

So here is some advice that I will try to take to heart again now:

Those who do not have their own vision of the future will have to accept living in the vision of other people. Where the capacity to draft new desirable images of the future is left unused, change can only be tolerated or suffered, but never created or designed. (changeX magazine)

If you'll excuse me, I need to write another job application now.

What should I do with my life?

I have been reading this article and found it needed to be reblogged. I wrote about it in my other blog though, so if you would like to find out about the article and my thoughts about it, go here. The original article by Po Bronson can be found here.

To give you a taste, it begins like this:

"It's time to define the new era. Our faith has been shaken. We've lost confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been tested. We've discredited the notion that the Internet would change everything (and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the grind). Our expectations have been dashed. We've abandoned the idea that work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that careers should be a wild adventure. Yet we're still holding on."

Thanks to Leila :)