By Terrance Turner
Forward Times
https://www.forwardtimes.com/
Love is in the air — or is it?
Lack of relationship experience aside, I’m not really feeling the love these days. In the absence of a current relationship (and familial relationships that, let’s just say, are “evolving”), there isn’t much inspiration. To be perfectly frank, my career is the great love of my life. As someone whose passion for his work is sometimes all-consuming, I put a lot of time, effort, and energy into what I do.
That’s why it was so heartening to hear Beyoncé’s acceptance speech at the Grammys on Feb. 2. “I wanna thank God that I’m able to still do what I love after so many years,” Queen Bey said as she accepted the Grammy for Best Country Album. “I think sometimes ‘genre’ is a code word to keep us in our place as artists, and I just want to encourage people to do what they’re passionate about.”
As they should. We spend a lot of our lives working: according to Gettysburg College alum and data scientist Andrew Naber, the average person spends one-third of his/her life at work — 90,000 hours. That’s entirely too much time to spend at a place (or a job) that you hate. But it seems that many Americans (particularly Black Americans) aren’t all that happy at work: a Pew Research survey last year found that just 50% of Americans were “extremely” or “very” satisfied with their work. For Black respondents, it was a mere 43%, trailing their Hispanic (44%) and White (55%) counterparts. The reasons for this are surely complex, but it got me thinking:
If you had to guess, how many people in your field actually love what they do?
“I think they enjoy it,” muses Carson, an insurance salesman with Premier Secure Insurance Solutions. “Because, first, it’s a lot of effort you would have to put in — a lot of standing and doing things you probably don’t want to do. But if you really enjoy it, you’ll go out there and do it. It’s enthusiasm. Like, you come up to people, smile. Things like that. You have to have a good attitude about it. If you’re not really a good-attitude type of person, or if this is something you’re not really into doing, you wouldn’t be here long. Or you wouldn’t be here at all.”
“Passion is what makes people great,” Carson says. “If you’re passionate about it, it helps you achieve things. Passion is what you have the love for. If you’re passionate about something, go get it. Simple as that.”
I posed the question to publicist Jordan Lee Harris, CEO of Who’s Who Public Relations. “I would have to say a large percentage love what they do,” he says. “For this job, you have to love it… there’s a lot that goes into it.”
He loves his job… for the most part. “The actual finished product of what I do is great,” he says. But the process isn’t. “I have to defend myself a lot,” he adds, explaining that the meanness and entitlement he encounters from some clients and colleagues can be draining. “I’m tired of people being pressed for press.”
Still, his passion for publicity drives and sustains him: “It’s helped me live the kind of adult life I wanted to.” College helped him discover his love for public relations. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do for the longest,” he admits, saying that he switched majors at least once before realizing he had a knack for promotions and publicity. In fact, he says, he was doing party promoting for some time before he realized he was essentially working in PR already.
But what about those who don’t know what they want to do or how to make what they love “work” for them? Harris urges people to look online (“YouTube University is a real thing”) and not be afraid to pursue what they truly want. “Take a risk. Take the necessary step. Get started.”
