Your Career and You: What IS Satisfaction?

I write a lot…probably too much…about “loving your job” and “following your passion.”

I do this for one relatively simple reason. For what seems like the better half of the past 50 years of my life, people…working professionals as well as young soon-to-be professionals (aka: “students”)…have been asking me for some sort of definition of “success.”

I have heard any number of responses from others over the years, ranging from “you’re successful if you’re making a lot of money” to “success is when you have a big office in a big company.”

There’s probably some merit in each of these definitions, and I certainly have never encouraged my students at Curry College, where, until recently, I oversaw the Public Relations Concentration in our Communication Department, to actively seek out poverty and a closet-sized office.

But success is sooo much more than posh trappings of office and bushels of money being dumped in your lap each payday.

Throughout my own professional career, both as a PR practitioner and as a PR professor, I have had the pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with people from all levels of the working world. Yes, a few of them are, as I term it, “gazillionaires.” Others are living paycheck-to-paycheck. And in each scenario, I have met someone who goes about every single day with a smile on his face because he is doing exactly what he wants to be doing.

Although the Rolling Stones declared quite successfully that “I can’t get no satisfaction,” I respectfully disagree.