There are so many different careers out there! It’s simply amazing. With more and more research, I have found that almost anything under the sun can be made into a career. Long gone are those days when all you could be was a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a banker, a pilot, and all those other boring jobs that you have grown up thinking about! Yes, that does include startups. And yes, I did criticize startups in one of my previous posts but what amazes me is the number of these new careers in the space of creativity, for example plain journalism. People actually make a career out of psychoanalyzing behaviors of employees and employers!
At my present job, one of my many small tasks is researching for new business opportunities for AD at Ford. This requires me to go through hundreds of RSS feeds daily to sort and select some relevant articles for Ford AD. Among these articles, I came across an article that talks about lessons learnt in the process of leaving a company, whether it was initiated by you or the company. The author of the article is a professional who analyzes the behaviors exhibited by employers and employees during this “difficult time” and actually suggests ways to make this process as painless as possible. He even opened an academy (and is the principal) to teach people these behavioral traits.
Can you imagine how wonderful it would be to just write common practical stuff and make a living out of that? The best part is that these problems will exist no matter how many people you train because some problems just can’t be solved because honestly people don’t really care about solving them either. But magazines and journals would always have sections that would print these articles and you would always make money! Not to mention, you get to do what you love best, write to your heart’s content! The other examples for these are the regular food critics, film critics, and god knows what other critics! All they have to do is try out things that they are passionate about and throw in some words to describe their experience. This is just so cool!
Not just writers, but so many people have made careers out of plain hobbies, for example, professional stagers. These people are best described as assistants to interior decorators. You know when you go to see houses that are decorated to show you how it would look when furnished so that realtors can attract you into buying the house? That decoration is done by these stagers. Once all the contractors finish the gutting and the redesigning work, the stagers bring in all the furniture and give the house the homey and modern or rustic looks that they realtors feel would most appeal to customers in the respective areas so that they sell quickly! How quaint! I would love to make big bucks off of a job like that! Then there are the basket decorators and gift bag decorators! All they do is sit at home and take orders to do what most people seem to be very lazy in doing, decorating gift baskets! Do you know how pricey these can get? Yet the creative minds thrive on what the general people find time consuming and what some call boring and in the process they make good money. In my own home I have one such creative mind. She gave up a “boring” regular salaried job to put together jewelry and sell them to local customers through a social networking site. This simple handmade jewelry doesn’t require much effort other than deciding which bead goes next to which one and what colors look great together. And voila! You have loads of customers lining up to buy these from you. Word of mouth spreads fast and soon you are into a full-fledged business supplying to local boutiques and making money like you never even imagined.
This is the life! But can everyone pursue such a life? Nope! It’s the same old story that I wrote for startups. I myself would love nothing better than to quit my job and sit and write all day and make money off of that! But number 1, I’m not that good! No one would pay me to read my writing! Number 2, what’s the guarantee that I can sustain it in the long run? At every store I go, normally what I like to buy is never in the clearance section or in the sale section. It’s almost always in the new arrivals section and among those, the most expensive one there! In order to buy what I really want to, I have to have money. In order to have money, I have to save some money after all my regular expenses! And in order to save money, I have to earn enough! And we are back to the beginning! Something’s got to give. Either I give up my spending choices or give up my earning choice! Tough choice! Maybe when I have enough, I can think of giving up my earning choice! Till then, Maybe I should concentrate on getting better so that when I do give up and pursue “my dream” what I earn will be close to what I leave! After all, quality must get recognition!
Musings of a confused nut! 