Career Advice Talk

Career Passion

4th June, 2009 - Posted by Robin Ogden -

Matthew B. Crawford I’m ready for your book!  Just finished reading your article, The Case for Working with Your Hands in the NY Times (thank you Lindsey Pollak for posting the link on Facebook…love how things get around in the world!).

If  I could give this article a scent, it would be ‘earthy’ - you know what I mean, that great smell of the first rain…yum, makes you feel like a kid with dreams again.

This terrific (must read) article points out that as a society we truly have become so bent on making sure that everyone is heading toward the ‘cubicle world’ with their career, that it seems we have forgotten about the work that comes from our hands - the work of the trades - artistry, farming, welding, electricians, mechanics, plumbing, and more.  This article was a refreshing reminder of  what  many people ‘love’ to do - to do work they are passionate about, whether understood or not by others.

There are so many of us out there that long to do work that we are  passionate about, but we feel that we need to find that passion in the cubicle world (because that is what our parents would expect, or our education was for, or our friends would expect, or we have been made to expect of ourselves over the years).   When perhaps we may have overlooked that what we truly desire is to ‘get our hands in to it’, ‘to get our hands dirty’, to really put our heart and soul into what we love to do via our hands, to express our savvy - our expertise - our worldliness through the gift of our hands.  Should we be shunned that we are not in a “suit and tie”, or should we celebrate that we are the ones that know how to not only use our minds…but use our hands too?

Interesting that all the credit seems to go to the ’suits’ - when what is working in parallel with the ’suits’ are the ‘hands’…let us celebrate the hands too (after all, they do make the suits…right?)

Don’t miss the article!  Try losing yourself in work that is “genuinely useful”!