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Home Is Where The Heart Is

March 23, 2005

Paper, paper, everywhere. Back in my professional past, I felt assailed by paper, besieged by paper, tyrannized by paper. 

The problem with the paper was that most of it didn't seem to matter. Sure, it mattered to the client (which, because I was a commercial lawyer, was usually a corporation). But it had nothing to do with flesh and blood, love and laughter, life and death. My work didn't touch lives. It just touched balance sheets.

So when City and Guilds (Britain's leading provider of vocational qualifications) recently published their survey of work happiness, I pricked up my ears.

In the UK, the survey reported, the eight happiest occupations are hairdressers, clergy, chefs, beauticians, plumbers, mechanics, builders, and electricians. And the unhappiest? Architects, civil servants, real estate agents, secretaries/PAs, lawyers, IT specialists, accountants and bankers.

At the risk of grossly over-simplifying complex factors, let me put forward a theory:

• People in the "happy occupations" are happier because their work engages a larger part of their being. They work with their hands or hearts as well as their heads. Mostly they spend their working lives touching real people or creating real things. 

• By contrast, the work of people in the "unhappy occupations" is essentially head-based. By and large, these folk don't work with real people or real things; they work with abstractions. Paper (or the computer screen, which is simply another medium for presenting information) dominates their lives.

Are you an unhappy civil servant or lawyer or banker? The solution is crystal-clear: Become a hairdresser!

OK, so that doesn't do it for you. Well, here's another approach. Reposition yourself in your career. Find a way to engage your heart as well as your head.

Then at last the career that oppresses you may start to feel like home.

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