When we come to Australia especially in our late teens and early twenties on our own it is very easy for us young people to put our dream careers on hold to pursue financial stability or even simple survival. There is nothing wrong with that, it does beg the question: will this make us happy individuals in the long term?

Researches have shown that Very fewer people in Australia are having a love affair with their job. These people are uniquely passionate about what they do. These are real people. They are artists, accountants, nurses, mechanic, truck drivers, farmers etc. and they do not have special degrees from fancy universities and they do not have perfect resumes, they are people just like you and me.

I am a recent graduate of Engineering and I have been to different mentoring seminars over the last 12 months and I have found few things from people who love their job is they have great life’s. They are well off the chart in wellbeing’s and my mentor once said to me loving your job is an antidote for human sufferings. Happiness depends on goodness of your job. These people who love their jobs are thriving and they are not struggling. Secondly, they did not land the job they loved as they slowly created those jobs out of ordinary positions, they designed and built those jobs. They did lots of editing with lots of efforts and turned them into reasonably good job into the one they could love. Other secrets I learned is loveworthy jobs are made not found.

There is an old story about motivational psychologist Earnest Dichter. He was hired by a company because the new time-saving product was not selling they thought it would sell. The brand new time-saving product called new cake mix. Cake mix came into the market in the 1940s and 50s.It was selling well in the beginning and then sales flattened. After a while company asked questions itself what’s up with the cake sale and why are not they continually growing as they have thought.  What Earnest did was he interviewed housewives. Housewives were the primary purchasers at the time. He asked them “why you do not buy cake mixes?” the answer was very interesting. The answer was that it was too easy, and housewives said, “when we buy cake mix from the supermarket, everything is already made and there is no creativity involves in baking them and it was not made with love.” After that Earnest went to his drawing board and he said, “What could we change about that process that would invite more mothers to feel like they made something rather than found something.” what was his conclusion? His conclusion was adding an egg by the customers not by the company. For the last fifty years, we have been adding eggs in our cake mix. Every time we bake a cake from cake mix we have to add one or two eggs in the cake mix not because the company could not add egg part in the mix, because we like making things, we have the drive to make things and we also have the drive to have ownership.

Another example is we always rent cars when going on holidays and most of us do not wash our rental cars. The reason is we do not own it and somebody is there to look after that rental car and we already paid for that. In the same way, if we have renter’s approach in our jobs we will never love our job. If we do not make our jobs own, we will never enjoy our jobs.

For us those who came to Australia to look for good life it is never late to look for a job which makes us happy, we need to play for our strength, doing what we do best which will make us feel better and makes us work better. If we spend our one-third of our life going to a job which is miserable, how could that not take a toll on the way we perceive ourselves? We do not get to do our best, we do not get to shine, we do not get praise and recognition and it just drains us. As a result, our confidence in our professional abilities will decline.

We need to realise that our frustrations are not unusual and are not primarily our fault, building a new social network to replace the one that had grown naturally back home and offered social, psychological and career support, requires a campaign that takes time, effort and even courage. My experience is we need to work to become more assertive and overcome timidity in the face of unfamiliar customs and language.