In today’s day and age, many people can become their own boss by being a “content creator” or “knowledge worker”. The internet is full of ambitious and creative people that make their living solely online.
This is absolutely amazing to realize and it’s easy to imagine yourself working in this way if that’s something you’re interested in.
As someone that has the dream of someday working fully in this way, it is easy for me to feel less excited or passionate about my “day job”.
I fell into the negative pattern of having little interest in advancing my career, learning new skills, and generally improving myself.
Over time, however, I began to realize the importance of my day job and have slowly started building up my motivation to work harder and try to improve myself and the skills I use at my job.
Most recently, I have taken on the role of a training video creator in my company so I am building my skills in video production which is an invaluable skill to have in the world of content creators.
With all of this in mind, I’d like to share with you my thoughts on the benefits of a day job.
Hopefully, by reading this article, you’ll realize that you shouldn’t write off your current job just yet in favor of a more glamorous career as a content creator.
A Day Job Creates A Routine
When you have a day job you most often have to work for a set period each day.
If you have gone straight from school to college to work, you’ll likely be very used to your routines and will have no trouble sticking to them.
Generally speaking, if you are someone that has a consistent routine each day, you’ll find it easier to get wake up in the morning and get your work done.
On the other hand, if you’re working solely for yourself, you are the one that is responsible for scheduling your day.
It can be difficult to remove yourself from your warm cozy bed and prioritize your work over playing video games all day.
As someone that works part-time, I have found that the routine of my day job allows me to have the same level of energy and motivation to work on my “days off”.
I am able to wake up at pretty much the same time each day, carry out my morning routine, and get into my workday without much friction.
A Day Job Keeps The Bills Payed
The most obvious advantage of a day job is the consistent paycheck at the end of the month or however often you get paid.
You can rest assured that you’ll have the same amount of money put into your bank account to allow you to pay your bills and put food on the table.
While it is possible for a side-gig to be a good source of income, you might feel under increased pressure to churn out the content to keep up with your living costs.
Over time this can become demotivating or stressful and you may long for the days of a regular “day job”.
With all that being said, if you look at your day job as a consistent source of income, this can free you to work on things that you enjoy outside of that without the fear of an empty wallet.
You can set aside time to work on your passion projects or new business ideas on the side to see if they can turn into new viable careers.
This financial freedom will allow you to be creative in your own time.
A Day Job Is An Excellent Opportunity To Develop Your Skills
If you look at your day job as a way to develop your skillset, you will be a lot more motivated to learn and grow. This has been my experience at least.
This may not always be the case depending on where you are working, but for me, my interests actually lie in the job I currently have i.e. UX Design/Web Design.
After all, that was what I enjoyed learning about in college and it’s been a huge part of my life for a number of years.
What I’m basically getting at here is that if you’re looking to get the most out of your day job, consider the skills you would like to learn and think about how you could learn and apply them in your day job.
If there are areas you would like to explore further or new skills you would like to develop, talk to your boss to see if this can be achieved.
There may be an opening as a Social Media Manager or someone who writes blog posts for the company website.
You can develop and use these skills to see if you enjoy them.
Then once you’ve acquired these skills, you can re-purpose them in your side-gig or anywhere else outside of your work.
The new skill you learn could end up developing into a totally new career path that you hadn’t considered before.
In my current job I use the following skills: technical writing, video production, UI/UX design skills, and some social media management.
As you can see, there are a lot of skills that I am utilizing in my day job that can be repurposed when I’m creating content online.
Not only that, but I enjoy the variety of the different types of work that I do so it keeps things interesting.
A Day Job Allows You To Work With And Learn From Others
Something that I hadn’t really considered from my day job is the benefit of working with and learning from others.
This is a key insight I learned from reading Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.
Since learning about this, I treat each interaction with the people I work with as a way to learn and consider other opinions.
On the other hand, when working for yourself you’ll most likely be working on your own. This makes it easy to simply draw from your own thoughts and opinions.
This can leave you completely blind to the ideas of others which is often where you can learn the most insightful things.
The benefit of a day job where you work on a team or have any interaction with others is that it will allow you to examine how other people operate.
You can learn how Jim tackles a complex problem with minimal requirements or how Molly manages her priorities in the morning.
Equally, this allows you an opportunity to share your thoughts and ideas with others.
If you’re someone that enjoys working productively and is very good at time management, you can share your insights on these areas with your co-workers to improve their day to day lives.
Plus, you’ll be guaranteed some feedback on how your ideas could be improved which will allow you to learn and grow as well.
More Insights
The book that inspired me to write this article is Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon. This book really resonated with me and I took a lot of great points away from reading it.
If you’d like to see all of the insights I uncovered from reading this book, you can check out my book notes here: Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon – Book Notes, Summary, Review
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading this article all the way to the end. If you did, please consider sharing it on social media as it will help others to find it.
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