Don’t ask how we landed on this topic during the ‘I HAVE A DREAM’ fashion and career workshop, we rambled on so much (in a good way) and the conversation wondered far and wide.
Everyone had such interesting opinions and valid questions, this one being: Is it normal to love your dream job and still hate aspects of it?
Let’s look at it like this…
A few facts about Dior:
(A) FACT: I am NOT a late night person (coffee has really helped)
(B) Contrasting FACT: I work late on Pepper Your Talk most nights!
(A) FACT: I enjoy waking up early and getting started on my daily tasks.
(B) Contrasting FACT: I find it so hard to wake up before 7.30am because I don’t get to bed until after 2am these days.
(A) FACT: I am not crazy about technology! I never update my iPhone and don’t even use my iCloud because it’s confusing eek.
(B) Contrasting FACT: At the moment, my business is 70% website, YouTube and social media. The other 30% is when I get to meet you guys, chat, have a laugh and discuss fashion face-to-face .
(A) FACT: A huge sense of my purpose is connected to being creative.
(B) Contrasting FACT: Understanding accounts, dealing with GoDaddy and carrying heavy camera equipment around London is very uninspiring and not creative at all.
So you get my point…
Most of the daily tasks we’re faced with are not part of why we love our jobs. But can we avoid them – NO! In my case, I simply can’t afford to pay anyone else to do them – I’ve had to accept that it’s the part of the job I LOVE to HATE.
Creating Pepper Your Talk was a dream come true, in the exact ways that a fairy tale will narrate it.
Take Cinderella for example, running out of the glamorous ball in order to get home and get back to work. I can’t count how many great evenings of networking, wine sipping and swapped emails have ended with me falling asleep on the tube, stumbling into my flat, showering and ending the night on emails, articles or editing. I’ve seriously lost count!
I sat myself down the other day (not at my desk and away from my laptop) and asked myself a very serious question. Because, as much as it’s good to laugh and joke at the hard times, it’s firstly very important to understand why they’re happening and how you’re going to deal with it.
My 1 question turned into several and this is what they were:
“Did this just happen, was I tricked or did I very consciously choose this?”
“When will this cycle end? Do I need it to end now. Like, will I die if I do this again tomorrow?”
“Why do I actually dislike it and can I change that feeling without changing the tasks?”
Answer: “Yes Dior, you did choose this. Very consciously in fact – actually you left your job to do this very thing! The cycle of hard, uncomfortable work won’t end for a while but that won’t be the end of the world. It’s actually the beginning of your new world – that you wanted, remember!!! You don’t really hate it, you just don’t like how new it is, because ‘newness’ forces you to create new habits and challenge your typical everyday”
The fact of the matter is, there will always be parts of a job that you JUST CAN’T STAND! Your job isn’t crappy, unfair or unbearably painful – you just have to learn to roll with it. And for incredibly stiff people like me, that flexibility will be painful at first.
This might be a particularly hard pill (that YOU went to the doctors and asked for) to swallow. Especially working in the fashion industry where others expect us to be hosting and toasting all day. “You work in fashion, your job must be so fun and easy”.
…Well actually, it’s not and I’m okay with that! Because I’m a boss (this still applies if you’re an assistant, exec or intern) and sometimes I love it, other days I hate it but everyday I’m learning and growing my skills.
Unless you’ve read this and though “No, actually, my job is VERY crappy, unfair and so so unbearably excruciating”. Well then maybe you need to revisit your options…
