““Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit if there are footprints on the moon.” ”
A decade and a half ago, I was deciding what I want to do with my life after high school graduation, and I picked psychology. I felt an urge to understand people - all of us humans, and especially myself. I wanted to figure out and learn how to help those who struggle. I am still very content with making this decision and I would not change it even if I could. Yet, deciding to do so in the area of work psychology and human resources has brought me on a journey full of twists and turns.
A decade ago, I stepped on the path of working in big multinational corporations. In the pursuit of giving my best, doing a good job, and personal growth, I have stumbled, struggled, and felt like a failure many times. I am not even talking about being focused on making a career or climbing the corporate ladder, mind you. I was just trying to do a solid job the best way I can, nothing too extra, just what I felt was the right thing to do. At times it has felt as if this path offers more new ways to struggle, rather than ways to help. Any corporate job has it’s complexities: it consists of your core job and responsibilities, additional projects on top, bureaucracy, matrix structures, layered hierarchies, policies, procedures, workarounds, urgencies, internal politics and recurring changes of all of the above. You can consider yourself successful (and in general, it often is one of the measures of development and success) just because you manage to learn how to navigate this system. Nevertheless, it rarely makes one truly happy.
Despite navigating the system for over ten years and becoming “measurably successful” at what I did, I have realized that I still lacked the sense of purpose and fulfillment. Something that I so strongly believed in when choosing my studies and which I still believe in to this day. It is my absolute conviction that there is more to working life than struggle and somehow managing. That it must be achievable regardless of the type of job you have or the size of the company you work for, and that satisfaction with life and at work should not be seen as a non-standard luxury.
And so here I am, sharing all I’ve figured out.