Nurturing Growth

Life can be complicated, whether you’re a student trying to figure out what career path to follow, an aspiring entrepreneur wondering how to start your first business, or someone who is contemplating a radical change in direction for earning income.

The thing is, there are a number of similarities between these situations. If you’d like we can go back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, explaining how you must have your most basic needs taken care of before you can thrive on a higher level.

I’d rather write about nurturing growth, likening discovering your ideal job with growing food in a sustainable way.

First you have to start with healthy soil. Unfortunately, in today’s world, there is less and less fertile soil, as too many people are focusing on short term gains, and forgetting that we need to feed the soil, so that it can feed us.

In the past, that meant rotating crops, and spreading natural fertilizers like manure, and fish bones. In terms of discovering your ideal job, you may wish to return to basics, making sure that you have a safe place to live, sufficient food to nurture your body, and clean water to drink. It’s really hard to discover or create an ideal job, if your basic needs are not taken care of.

This sometimes means taking the slow path, for example taking a job at a fast-food restaurant, to access discounted meal deals, and to be able to consistently pay rent on a room, while you work towards gaining skills and knowledge to get a better job.

When your basic needs are taken care of, you’ll have more energy to learn. This doesn’t have to be formal post-secondary education. We have lots of libraries in Canada offering all kinds of knowledge, from books (paper, e-books, and audio) to access to free computers and internet.

Volunteering is another way to learn new skills. Say for example you’d like to become an accountant. You could start off learning how to be a bookkeeper, with basic accounting classes in high school, followed by adult education programs, and then volunteering to do the books for a not-for-profit organization. You’ll be able to include your new skills and experience on your resume. You may meet someone who needs a bookkeeper for their small business, and they could become your client or employer! (Read about the difference between being an employee and a contractor in this BDC article.)

Once you’ve been employed as a bookkeeper you could save your money to help pay for the education needed to become an accountant. Better yet, find an employer who subsidizes your education, and apply to your provincial or territorial government for additional funding.

Moving back to the metaphor of growing food, education and experience is like adding fertilizer to your dirt. I can imagine some of you muttering to yourselves “you mean I have to put up with crap to succeed?” And the answer is, yes, sometimes you have to deal with unpleasant things to nurture growth.

Continuously learning new skills that help you make progress towards your goals, is like watering the seeds you’ve planted.

Surrounding yourself with folks who cheer you on, rather than throwing shade at you, is like getting sufficient sunlight.

It takes time to nurture your growth as you discover your path to your ideal job. Often your skills will mature at uneven levels, like the image accompanying this blog. There are a few beans nearing time to harvest, with a flower blooming next to them.

The richer the soil you start from, the easier it is to nurture growth. That being said, soil reclamation is happening in many parts of the world, for example, 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and pulp were placed in a barren Costa Rican park in the 1990’s, the composting peels turned that area into a vibrant and diverse forest within 15 years. If you’re interested, you can read about this project in this Princeton University article.

Back to the nurturing job growth metaphor, by learning new skills, and practicing what you learn, you can nurture your ability to discover opportunities on the journey to creating your ideal job, no matter where you’re starting from.

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