As a young professional, work in the context of establishing a career can be daunting. We all enter the workforce with differing personalities, home environments, past experiences, and generational baggage, all of which affects our overall attitude towards work. To say I was ill-prepared to enter the workforce isn’t a fair statement. My parents, along with several teachers, church leaders, and well-meaning professors, did their best to prepare me for the real world reality train I was to board upon my graduation. But I was blissfully naïve, probably due to my millennial self-centric ethos, and unaware of my impending derailment.

“We all enter the workforce with differing personalities, home environments, past experiences, and generational baggage, all of which affects our overall attitude towards work.”

For the first 21 years of my life, I somehow managed to work only in areas I excelled. I was lucky enough to receive a good education at a young age, and therefore breezed through high school and college on my smarts instead of actually learning how to study hard. Despite my parents’ encouragement, self-discipline didn’t corresponded well with my personality and never showed up on my list of strengths, and subsequently I had little value for it. So when I walked across the graduation stage and grabbed my diploma, it didn’t matter to me that no interviews were in the lineup. I had a dream job in my sights—the ultimate, all-fulfilling career that paid me to do what I loved—and my fervor and passion, not to mention endless amount of talent, were going to get me there.

God, whether in His goodness or humor—I’m not sure which, though it’s probably both—often doesn’t put us where we imagine ourselves being. Instead He purposely puts us in very different places to help us learn essential lessons we’re too stubborn and foolish to teach ourselves. I’m certain this is what was going on with my first real world job experiences. Needless to say I didn’t land my dream job. I ended up working multiple part-time gigs, which I initially felt were beneath me until I realized I wasn’t very good at them. It was incredibly frustrating to get to the end of a workweek and experience little to no reward, only to start the cycle back up again the following Monday. Not only was I not feeling fulfilled, I was miserable.

“I had to come to a place of humility, an honest moment where I was stripped of security and self-worth, to understand the immense value of working hard for the sake of working hard.”

But the jobs weren’t making me miserable; it was my attitude. I had to come to a place of humility, an honest moment where I was stripped of security and self-worth, to understand the immense value of working hard for the sake of working hard. Working hard because it’s what God asks of us, not because it’s rewarding. Working hard because it builds our character and teaches us endurance, not because it’s the job we’ve always dreamed of doing. Work was not designed to fulfill us; it was designed to show us we need to be filled with something greater.

I still don’t have my dream job, and that’s okay. My dreams have shifted, and though I still aspire to establish a successful career, my motivations have changed. It takes a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of—dare I say—discipline, to be really good at something. And I hope to remain humble in the process, but if not, I’m confident God will find a creative way to remind me. What a mercy.