Why Have Only One Job?
By Jeremy C. Wright | Related entries in Job & WorkI’ve realized that I no longer have only one job. And you know what? I like it. Sure, it’s interesting having several “bosses” and clients in different industries expecting different things, but it’s also exhilirating. One day I might be writing, another I might be consulting, another I might be speaking and another I might just take half the day off to spend time with my family. Like today.
I’ve found that this mix of things to do keeps me sane, keeps me grounded and means that I never “hate my job”. After all, I’ve got 3-5 of them, so if one of them stinks I can always switch it out for something equally profitable that I enjoy more. It’s easier to replace a job when it’s only 20% of your income than it is when it’s 100%.
In an earlier post, I talked briefly about transitioning to your dream job.
My real secret is that my dream job isn’t just one job. Currently, I hold the following “positions” at “Jeremy Wright, Inc.”:
1. Blogger
2. Consultant
3. Author
4. Courseware developer
5. Speaker / Trainer
6. Writer
And I do these in areas such as time management, personal finance, blogging, communications, marketing and technology.
My day-to-day life is actually fairly diverse. Basically, early on, getting paid to work on my own involved doing all kinds of things I didn’t enjoy. In my first month of being self-employed, I was a:
1. Grunt journalist
2. Grunt writer
3. Grunt blogger
“Grunt” meant doing the things nobody else wanted to do.
Slowly I transitioned each of these individual positions to something I enjoyed more. I replaced the journalist with the consultant. I replaced the writer with becoming a book author. I replaced just being a blogger with becoming a speaker. And, eventually, I added some of the other bits around this.
Maybe you love writing, but you also enjoy crafts and you like helping people. So maybe your mix of jobs is writing freelance articles (some on crafts and helping people), starting a home business around crafts, and working with local government agencies to help people with various disabilities on a part-time basis (most areas have positions for people to just spend time with folk who need some normalcy in their lives… think of it as Big Brother for adults).
Or maybe you’re a software developer. So you write some of your own software, you write some articles, you start a blog and you do some contract work.
I honestly believe one of the reasons people “hate” their jobs is that they’re only doing one thing. And doing one thing gets old.
Having more than one “job” gives you freedom, flexibility and much more joy than trying to make one job work. It’s also a lot of presure if you’re trying to find your “one dream job”. Consider splitting it up. One advantage to doing so is that you can slowly ramp up to your dream job (and away from your hated one), as opposed to needing one position which meets all of your financial needs.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2005 and is filed under Job & Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
August 5th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
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Not just doing one thing
Jeremy Wright writes about getting closer to his dream job: My real secret is tha [...]
August 7th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
[...]
Jeremy Wright writes a piece over at the Wealthy Blogger about actually having multiple jobs within one job as a ProBlogger - something I was only speaking [...]
August 8th, 2005 at 6:50 am
Jeremy, thanks for a worthy piece of writing there. I think that is the problem a lot of people face, confining themselves to one thing only and not possibly diversifying what they do.
August 8th, 2005 at 3:54 pm
I agree wholeheartedly. Having just spent 8 years in the Navy, I don’t want the feeling of being “trapped”– whether it is at a factory or on a submarine. That is why my wife and I are going into our own businesses.
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