The definition of the word ‘career’ today typically relates to the main stream of remunerative work we do through the course of our lives. If you think about the concept of career in terms of the history of mankind, its a strange little thing that has only been around for a couple of hundred years. It is an aberration. It only arrived with the organization of large corporations.

With the continual development of telecommunications and resulting decentralization of workforces, who know how long it will continue to exist. If you are honest with yourself, you will see that all ‘career’ ultimately describes is our progression through a list of skills and opportunities someone else has made available to us, where someone else is telling us where we fit in, and what our value is.

I always thought it interesting that ‘care’ was in the word career. It is as if these corporations have agreed to take care of us during our working life. They have agreed to baby sit us, so we do not make decisions, progress in our own time or decide our own value. Apparently we cannot be trusted with our own development and cannot be trusted to measure our own worth. This is why we need our ‘carers’ to map our way and only let us proceed when they believe we are worthwhile (and when they can afford it, and only if they can find another person to fill our current role)

In light of all this, it is really not that surprising to hear so many people complain about their jobs (or careers). It’s an endless process of hard work that is all shaped and determined by another person higher up, based on their criteria and principles…all of it aimed at securing their future rather than one’s own. Yet despite all that all of us continue using the word ‘career’ as though it represented the pinnacle of human achievement.

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?

Now, if you bringing up the idea of ‘making a living’ well then you are finally speaking a language I can understand and appreciate. In case it slipped by you, the attention here is solely on the idea of life itself. It is a small detail that career-lusters tend to lose by the wayside. We were put on this planet to live our lives, not to be babysat; we need to live life at our very own rate, falling and getting back up on our own. The idea of letting another person set our value in this world rather than doing it ourselves does not form a part of this picture. All that is the basis of the idea of making a living: it’s about making life itself worthwhile.

These ideas capture what I love so much about internet marketing. Fine, it’s necessary for you to acquire new skills in order to write competitive and performing websites, fully optimized for search engines, but all that is just technical mumbo-jumbo which most anyone can learn.

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 Dad, Damian Papworth recognizes the constant battle for time, which rages between his office and his home. He always endeavors to invent a way to improve family life. Recently he researched baby high chairs, doing some special analysis of portable high chairs.

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