The Long Way to the Top

As I make my way through the world of corporate America, I feel very little like I am climbing any sort of a ladder. More appropriately I think, would be a sort of horizontal movement, kind of like crawling through a minefield on my stomach, with bloodied elbows. In this journey so far, it seems that the mines are unavoidable, as the only way to cross this great span towards personal and financial satisfaction seems to be through some pain and misery. I should say that I understand I have it much better than a large percentage of the world's population, but one is not usually compared to all $6 billion+ of the earth's inhabitants, usually just our peers. My battle scars are for the most part my own fault, in some ways the result of decisions that I have made and in others, the consequences of some decisions that were made poorly.

I am content though with my situation at the moment, as I feel that I have a goal in mind and have accepted there may not be a shortcut in my situation. Instead of staying in the sales game, in which the rewards seem to be immediate but the monotony endless, I have decided to make a stand and go after what I believe will make me happy in the long run: doing something that involves creating instead of just convincing someone to buy something. I don't mean any disrespect to salespeople- no business can exist without sales. They are vitally important, but sales is not for everyone.

In my opinion there are two main reasons to want money. The first is the obvious one, which is because most things in life that are necessary to survive (at least as we are accustomed) cost a certain amount of money. There are however certain degrees of this first situation.

Everyone knows the phrase "money can't buy happiness" or the variations of it. For the most part I believe this to be true- having an infinite amount of possessions means nothing if you do not find the beauty in the things in your life that cannot be quantified. On the opposite end of the spectrum though, you can have a lot of positive things going for you in your life, but without freedom from fear of the dollar, this can be overshadowed.

The second reason some people seem to want money is to show other people how much of it they have. I am not in the position of being able to do much of that, but I hope when I am it wont interest me. I want enough money to have enough freedom to enjoy life, the thing that takes place when you are not at work.

I only wish to reach a happy medium, or maybe what I want isn't reasonable. I want to enjoy what I do. I want to leave work feeling good about myself and satisfied that I am using some of my best abilities to complete a task that doesn't feel like work. Typing this brings something to my attention however: I don't think as humans that we are meant to sit at a desk for hours, weeks, months, years and decades of our lives. Maybe some of us can handle it better than others, but I can never quite shake the feeling that while I am at work, there are much more exciting things going on in the world that I can contribute to and be a part of.