Getting My Dream Job

Well, over a week ago I found the job that I really want to get. It fits with my experience, it fits with my career goals, even the salary is right on. So how do I get it?

I have submitted my resume, I wrote them a nice cover letter explaining, quite clearly, why I was the right person for the job. And then I never heard from them. So I started researching "How do I get the job I want." Most of the answers I found on the internet were telling people how to find out what job they really wanted. They would ask questions like, "what are your hobbies or interests?" "what would you do for free?" "And what did you want to be when you grow up?"

Well, these questions were quite a few steps back from where I needed to be. I was looking for information more along the lines of "do you know someone who works at the company you want to work for?" or "when is it okay to just show up to an office and hang out?"

Instead, I decided to answer the questions to figure out what my dream job might be. My hobbies and interests relate back to reading--I am very into Brandon Sanderson right now, along with my ongoing quest to read everything by C.S. Lewis--and writing, especially fiction, whenever I get the chance.

As far as what I would do for free, the answer was similar. A lot of my reading is unpaid, of course. I love to follow long, esoteric rabbit holes of research across the internet, like the history of the toquilla straw hat, and I would gladly do this kind of reading for free! And although I get paid for most of my writing, things like my novel and this blog are "work" that I do for free.

Finally, what did I want to be when I grew up--this one is an essay question because it depends when you asked me. At a very young age, 8 or 10, I remember wanting to be a scientist that worked in a lab. I don't really know where that came from. For a long period of my early teenage years, I was very into comic books and would have said it would be my dream job to draw comics for a living. It wasn't until much later that I learned that there were writers who did little or no drawing, like Chris Claremont and Alan Moore. In high school, like most other teenage boys, I guess, I wanted to make video games. But underneath, or maybe within, each of those, I really wanted to write stories.

In college I went from being an art major, to a communications major, to a business major. I got my first job in sales and marketing. I got my MBA with a focus in marketing, my MS in business, and worked for the past 8 years in marketing and advertising, but I never really did what I thought I wanted to do. It's more like I've done what I needed to do to get and keep a job. I've done what I could get paid to do. Then I just kind of told myself that what I was doing was what I "wanted" to do.

So, no, I'm not really sure that I found my dream job after all.