What are your career goals? Are you focused on where you actually want to be or are you only looking at the bottom of the pyramid?
Which pyramid?
I want to direct your attention now to a diagram that will help you visualize the hopeless treadmill of any career not based on personal fulfillment. The left side of the picture below illustrates Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (published in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation), and the right side is an overlay of Herzberg’s Motivational Maintenance Model, which applied Maslow’s earlier theory toward the world of work.
John Place is talking about what you’re working for. In this diagram you have immediate goals that form the base and build up to the higher needs of the pyramid. The idea is you need to accomplish each step before ‘fulfillment’.
For instance, why would you work a job only for the money? If that is fulfillment enough, then no problem. But if once you have the money situation sorted, and your work isn’t fulfilling in any sense – like Herzberg’s examples of job security and recognition – what can you look forward to?
The #1 Reason Your Job Sucks (and How to Fix it) – [JohnPlace]
I have worked some jobs at the bottom level, just for the money, and that is about the most miserable I have ever been. I have made it to Fulfillment http://disasterology.blogspot.com/2007/07/it-is-nice-to-be-recognized-for-your.html (sorry, I’m not great at the tags) and it makes work enjoyable.
[...] Where Your Priorities Lie At Work – lifehack.org (tags: career) [...]
So someone who works a ridiculously high paying job they hate for 10 years and then retires to a gorgeous island to sit on the beach all day has made the wrong decision and he should have taken a job that made him sort-of happy (as happy as one can be working instead of taking leisure) until he is 65?
Are you familiar with the old robot proverb, “Does not compute”?