If you were an alien visiting Earth (stay with me) you would be forgiven for thinking that the lives of Earthlings are almost completely consumed by a strange concept known as ‘job’.

It’s not surprising, after all we spend a very large proportion of our waking lives either at work, or thinking about it.  Even in our so called ‘down time’ our job is never far from our minds; indeed thanks 24hr connectivity (and REACHABILITY) to escape entirely from work one would have to set up camp atop Everest, assuming of course that they haven’t installed wifi there yet!

The situation is made doubly worse by the constant heavy bombardment we face in the digital age.  One glance at our Facebook or Linkedin news feeds and we are immediately reminded of our own inferiority ‘ Why not congratulate Simon on his promotion?’ because Simon’s success makes me feel like a failure, that’s why not!

All of these factors combine to create an environment which leads us to place unrealistic demands on ourselves; suddenly, the most important things in our lives is the advancement of careers because…. you know, Simon is better than us!

An absolute load of nonsense of course, but it’s a very difficult mindset to break!

Here are a few career quotes of of wisdom that we hope will help you to contextualise your work, and realise that it really isn’t as important as you think: or that it is important, but not in the ways that you imagined.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”  Alice Walker

 
“Our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” M. Scott Peck

 
“We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.” Martin Luther King
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”  Theodore Roosevelt
“It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.”  Benjamin Franklin
“A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night” Marilyn Monroe
“I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as ‘making a life”  Maya Angelou
“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.” Ralph Waldo Emerson