Wizer Solutions Blog

I was going through my old blogs from some years back and found the entry below that I’d like to re-post here:

30 July 2008
I was an hour early to a meeting at a client’s site (a hospital) the other day so I arranged to have a lunch date with one of my girlfriends who worked there. In the staff cafeteria, I ran into an old friend. He smiled down at me as he said, “Hello” and though his face was very familiar, I could not recall his name. So there I was talking to him as if I actually knew him. He appeared to know me – well, I’m kind of hard to forget. *cough*. I slowly started to recall that he might be someone I studied with during my undergrad years at Uni. Though I remembered him as someone from my I.T classes at Uni, I was still having problems remembering his name. When he saw my confused look about why he’s in the hospital staff cafeteria, he quickly told me that he was working there as a nurse. I was surprised that this big Nigerian guy from my I.T classes is now working as a NURSE! I couldn’t believe it. He roared with laughter at my consternation. I asked him to show me his name badge to prove it – I actually asked for it so that I could look at his name. He remembered my name and I felt terrible not remembering his. After a quick look at his badge and seeing his name, all the memories came flooding back. How could I forget? We worked on a complicated I.T project during my 3rd year at Uni. This is going back a few years – year 2003. We didn’t do too well in that project but I remembered that that particular project group, which included this guy towering over me, was one of the most enjoyable groups I had worked with. We got along well and though we screwed up the project, we learnt a lot about ourselves and the industry we were hoping to get into.
So we sat down with our lunch boxes at the staff cafeteria and talked about the good old days. He is now married with 3 kids! Wow! He was single when I first met him. Funny how time just flew. I was curious about his decision to drastically change his career. He told me that he worked in the I.T industry for a few years and though he was earning well, he wasn’t happy and didn’t feel fulfilled. He went to nursing training as a novice and after 3 more years of gruelling study, he is now a qualified nurse, mental health nurse to be precise. He told me that he didn’t know anything about nursing when he first started his training. All he knew was that he wanted to do something that helps people. And now, he loves his job. He worked shifts so that he could spend time with his kids and he really enjoyed the flexibility of his job. His wife had also decided to quit her job as an accountant and was in the process of getting trained up to become a nurse.

Wow, I admired this guy. Good on him for recognising what was not making him happy and finding something that finally made him feel like getting up in the morning to go to work. How many of us can say that? How many of us drop our shitty jobs and do what makes us truly happy? Not many. I know I haven’t yet. My old friend was an instant inspiration to me. Hearing his story made me question why any of us should spend our lives doing things and taking up jobs that makes us unhappy.

I understand that due to the pressures that the modern day presents us with, it is hard for many of us to escape the vicious cycle of continually doing the things we hate over and over again. However, I can’t help but wonder if most of these pressures are created by us. Consider the paradox – the harder we work to achieve happiness, the farther we get from it. I’m guilty of this too. I keep thinking, “Ok, I’m going to do this job to make enough money and then I’m going to quit and do something I really like,” but the thing about money is that it’s never enough. Human nature persists us to want more than what we essentially need. Our greed has created the world we live in – new gadgets enticing people to spend more making us work harder, along with sky rocketing fuel / food prices, increasing interest rates etc – these things are making it harder for us to escape the trap that binds us to our shitty jobs, and stops us from pursuing our true happiness.

It is for these reasons that I applaud my old friend from Uni for saying “enough!” and found an alternative path to live and work while truly being happy.

I have started reducing the “wants” this year and am concentrating on living a simpler life – some things are more difficult than others but at least it’s a start. It’s not too easy to step out of the herd behaviour.

- WT