What Can I Do When I Grow Up?: A young person's guide to careers, money - and the future
160
What Can I Do When I Grow Up?: A young person's guide to careers, money - and the future
160Hardcover
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Overview
Children frequently ask what they should be when they grow up. Surrounded by adults whose jobs seem to define them, they learn to expect simple answers, like "a doctor," or "a teacher, '' or "a lawyer."
But the truth can be a lot more complicated. Deciding what to do with your working life is one of the biggest, most difficult questions of all. This beautifully illustrated guide helps expand children's ideas about work and inspire them to think creatively about their future, while reminding them that their dream job might not even exist yet!
Written expressly for children, this unique book works through important questions like: How can I discover my passions? What does a "good" job involve? How much money should I make? How does the economy function?
Perfect for curious kids ages eight and up, What Can I Do When I Grow Up is sure to spark fruitful conversations that excite and inspire the next generation.
- THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED FOLLOW UP to to Big Ideas for Curious Minds.
- A THOUGHTFUL AND PRACTICAL GUIDE to the world of careers, aspirations, and jobs.
- TALKS TO CHILDREN ABOUT MONEY in an an approachable, pragmatic way.
- BEAUTIFUL ILLUSTRATIONS by Tyla Mason throughout.
- INTERACTIVE ACTIVITIES for children 8 and up.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781912891207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The School of Life |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2020 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 1,137,021 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Lexile: | 1110L (what's this?) |
| Age Range: | 9 - 15 Years |
About the Author
The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.
The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.
The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.
Read an Excerpt
Ten: What makes a job enjoyable?
We’re learning: earning or making money are an important part of having a job. But getting paid isn’t the same as actually enjoying what you are doing at work. So what are the other things that can make jobs interesting and satisfying? What is ‘fun’ and ‘meaningful’ at work?
i. Helping people
We’ve been circling this topic for a while. One of the basic reasons why people enjoy their work is that they like helping other people. This sounds a bit strange because we’re used to thinking that we like getting things out of others. But it truly is often far lovelier to feel you’ve helped someone than to have received something from them. Maybe a friend was a bit worried and you said something that cheered them up – and you felt a special glow at having been able to change the way they felt. Or maybe one day you made breakfast for your mother and she was extremely pleased with the way you laid out the dishes and brought up the tray – and that was rather amazing for you, even if it was quite a bit of work. Strangely, it can simply be a lot more fun giving someone a present than receiving it.
Some jobs don’t really help people very actively. Suppose you worked in gambling: that’s when people try to make money by guessing what horse is going to win a race or who is going to win a tennis tournament. Customers almost always get it wrong and lose money and deeply regret having wasted their money. If you worked in gambling, every day you’d know that there were lots of people getting more and more unhappy around you. It could slowly drive you mad...
Therefore, one of the first things to ask of any job is not ‘How much does it pay?’ but ‘How actively does it help others?’ In asking this, you’re not being a saint. You’re focusing on yourself in the best way - because as properly wise people know, pleasing others really is a joy.
ii. Using your skills and abilities
Imagine you are getting dressed – but you are only allowed to use one hand. It’s an intriguing challenge at first and it is possible. But after a while it’s frustrating. It seems so silly not to use your other hand. This little thought experiment is telling us something important. We get frustrated when we can’t make use of our abilities. This can happen at work. Suppose you are really good at arguing – you like working out why something is right, you are good at finding reasons and explanations. Not all that many people are good at this. But imagine you had a job where you weren’t allowed to argue - you just had to agree with people (if you were running a hotel for instance it wouldn’t be a good idea to argue with the people staying there). It would be like having to do everything with one hand behind your back. And imagine, by comparison, the joy of taking a job in politics, where arguing is what you would try to do every day. At last, you’d feel you were free to be yourself.
Or suppose you are really good at design – you can come up with all kinds of interesting ideas about what shape something could be or what colours might be nice together. Then imagine you have a job where no-one cares about these sorts of things. You’d feel that a really good part of you wasn’t needed or wanted. You would feel crushed and overlooked. Whatever the money was like, you’d be dying inside.
The things we are good at aren’t accidents. They are connected to the unique ways our brains works; they make every one of us different and special. The trick to finding a good job is therefore to know more about our sources of pleasure and talent. It’s impossible to say what a good job might be for everyone in the world. It all depends on the intricate fit between your skills – and the needs of the world. And so the challenge is to stop thinking about what a good job is in general; and to start to think about what a good job is ‘for you’, in other words, what your particular tastes, talents and interests are.
iii. Seeing the result of your work
Imagine you lived a long time ago and worked on a cathedral. It would have taken a very long time to build and hundreds of people would have been employed to make it. Maybe you spent years helping to build the roof or you were designing and making just one of the windows. You’d only be making a very small part of the building, but you could see how what you were doing was important. All the effort you were making (going to work when it was cold, getting tired, getting dust all over your face...) would result in something you could see and that other people could admire. You'd feel proud of what you had done (even though you’d only done a small part). You’d feel a sense of accomplishment.
That feeling tends to be very important at work. It can happen in lots of different ways. A teacher might feel a sense of accomplishment when a pupil reads a book on their own for the first time. Or someone who has started a business making surfboards might feel a sense of accomplishment when a champion surfer chooses their equipment. Or an inventor of electronic gadgets might feel a sense of accomplishment when she saw a group of kids playing with one of them in the park. A big requirement of work is a feeling that it’s all adding up to something that you can step back and be proud of: that you’ve had an impact, however, small, on the world; that you’re leaving things tidier and better than when you started.
Table of Contents
IntroductionWhat is a job?
Why are there so many different jobs?
Why many jobs can be a bit boring
How do jobs get invented?
Good and bad jobs
Why adverts matter
Visible and invisible jobs
Why do some people get paid more than others
How important is money?
What makes a job enjoyable?
What do you really enjoy?
How is work like school?
Why do people end up in jobs they don’t like?
How to answer people who ask you what you’re going to do