Guest Martin Gibbons Says Why Loving Your Job is So Important to Your Career Success

Special to WWDS by Martin Gibbons of PeopleMaps

You can’t enjoy career success unless you love what you do. Sure you can make money and sure you can get promotions but success, in the full sense of the word, will always elude you.

This is why you see so many people with high paid jobs looking so miserable.

How do you know if you love your job? Well if your work environment is in harmony with your core personality, then the chances are you will love your job. You see, loving your job has nothing to do with the job title or the money you are paid or the type of company car you get. To love your job you have to be doing something that is in harmony with your core personality. And it is different for different people.

Why is loving your job so essential to success? Anything worthwhile will come packaged with challenges. It will come with hard times and difficult situations. It will be a series of hills and valleys. When you love what you do for its own sake, regardless of remuneration etc, then you will find the strength to get you through the difficult times; it will get you up the hills and see you over the bumps.

Job roles have a personality too. Or at least it is easier to think of it in these terms. In the same way that human personality is a cocktail of Introversion, Extraversion, Task and Feeling, work environments also have a personality. If the personality demanded by the job role is compatible with yours then you have cracked it. Thereafter it’s a case of figuring out how you monetize it. In most cases it’s a matter of negotiating a salary. In other cases you may need to be more creative.

Say you love teaching guitar. Well there are very few companies in the world that will pay you to do that, outside of the mainstream educational establishment. Let’s define it further – you love teaching guitar on a one to one basis, as opposed to a classroom full of kids. Now you have established that a school is the wrong environment for you. There are many people with a natural love of teaching but they are disillusioned with teaching in schools and assume it is their relationship with teaching that is wrong. In actual fact it’s the crowd control element of teaching that is the problem. From a personality perspective, the personality that loves crowd control and the personality that loves to teach, would be very different. Just because a job role has the word “teacher” in it doesn’t mean to say that it is a suitable role for a teacher!

And this is another key point you have to grasp early; “job title is a very blunt instrument.” You must look past the job title and look more closely at the job role. “High School Teacher” is a good example. If the job title was “Crowd Control Technical, working with large groups of pubescent teenagers,” I doubt so many qualified teachers would be so keen to apply.

I personally don’t agree with the philosophy of “Do what you love and the money will eventually flow in.” If you consider my above example again, the guitar teacher that doesn’t want to teach to groups of children is going to have to become quite creative as to how they make high levels of income. Perhaps they have to work with very high paying clients only or perhaps they set up an Internet business teaching guitar live online. However, loving what you do will get you half way there, with an opportunity of discovering how to cover the other half, and make good money too. Doing a job you don’t love just for the money will only every get you half way there – and it is generally unsustainable. Success in its most rounded sense will always elude you. When you do what you love you are more motivated to figure out imaginative ways of making money at it.

My young cousin passed her high school maths four years ahead of her peers. There was no doubt that Claire was a gifted mathematician. Naturally her teachers, her guidance counselor and her parents all wanted her to go to university and do accountancy. But Claire was resisting the idea, much to their disgruntlement and bewilderment. But being only 15 years old she struggled to express herself and justify her feelings. But Claire was right. You see Claire was also great fun, popular and in constant need of excitement. The only accountancy job that could have kept her interested is if she were the accountant to the mob! Only then would she find sufficient excitement. Claire instinctively knew that the work environment was going to be completely out of kilter with her core personality. Just because she could do something didn’t mean she should.

In a world completely hung up on skills matching, where personality is barely considered, it is no wonder that so many people hate their jobs. Everyone focuses on the skills and yet it is the personality that will determine if you will be happy at a job or not. Ultimately, it is your personality that will determine if you are successful in the job or not.