In today’s world, the word ‘career’ generally is taken to imply the principal type of remunerative work we perform throughout our adult lives. When considering the broader course of human history, the very idea of a career has only surfaced in recent centuries; a curiosity, or aberration if you will, that only reared its head since the founding of major corporations.

Given the ongoing development and advances in telecommunications and the consequent decentralization of global workforces there is no good way to tell just how much longer the idea will persist. In all honesty, if you really think about it, it is evident that the only thing a ‘career’ denotes is a person’s meandering through a series of skills and opportunities that another person set forth for them; a sort of dictated notion of where to fit in and what a person’s value is.

It has always seemed revealing to me that the word itself (career) contains the word ‘care’ within it. As if to imply that the companies and corporations for which we perform our career have taken for themselves the role of caring for us during the course of our professional adult lives. It is as if they become babysitters, keeping us from learning how to make decisions wisely or learning how to value ourselves on our own. It’s all based on a certain basic unwillingness on their behalf to let people become the managers of their own development, to determine their own worth. Which is why we supposedly have ‘careers’, to help us find the way forward in life, something which only holds much promise if and when we are deemed to be worthwhile and the employer can afford to see us promoted (which implies they have someone to fill our spot).

Considering all this, it’s no surprise so many people hate their jobs. All it is is work work work, completely based on someone else’s directives and vision of the future, all geared towards building their life and not one’s own. Nonetheless, we all continue to use the term ‘career’ as if it were the end all and be all of human existence.

I know as a child, when my parents went out for dinner, being baby sat definitely was not the highlight of my week. Living my life through paying with my brothers and friends was. Why do we change as adults? Why do we start measuring our success and life through someone else’s eyes? Why do we let them direct our paths? Why have careers become so important?

Switch over to another phrase, ‘making a living,’ and now you are finally speaking a language I can appreciate. In case you didn’t notice, the focus here is simply on life itself, this is something which ‘careerists’ tend to forget in my opinion. Our purpose on this planet is to live, not to have babysitters. This life is for us to learn on our own two feet, at our own pace: to experience, love, and grow. It’s a life in which we need to set our very own value, and not have someone do that for us. All of which is the essence of making a living, it’s about making life itself.

Which is why I have found the idea of working in internet marketing so appealing over time: though you surely need to learn a lot and acquire skills you lacked previously so as to be able to write successful, money-earning sites that are SEO-savvy, that’s not that hard and can really be done by anyone.

No, the real thing I love about this line of work is the fact that in order to make it big you have to find what it is you are really passionate about. The reason here is simple to understand. Whatever subject you are passionate about has, to a certain measure, a language of its own; only those who really are passionate about the matter will be able to comprehend that language. By doing so, you are opening the door to being able to sell yourself to others in the same niche for the true value which you possess. Love it or leave it, but that is the way of the web.

Which is what makes this such a beautiful industry: to find success, you first have to find your passion. And in that sense I do not consider myself to have a career, but rather to be someone that merely makes a living. Even including this article, everything I work on I am passionate about. I never wake up dreading life anymore, but rather jump up out of bed eager to tackle a new day. No more fretting about missed opportunities or promotions I didn’t get, etc. etc. I measure my own value according to the web creations I make, the contribution they make to my back account, the lifestyle I get to enjoy and the extra time I have on my hands.

Given such a beautiful scenario, I could never bring myself to do anything else.

As a new father, Damian Papworth recognizes the consistent battle for time, which rages between his career and his home. He always tries to find a way to enhance family life. Recently he researched baby high chairs, doing some specific analysis of portable high chairs.

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