Find, Prepare for, and Pursue the Work You Were Born to Do!
Main topic(s):
Helpful Links:
What do you think 1,000 elderly people had to say?
From Robbie on the January 3, 2015 Career Callings Radio Show:
“I just finished reading this book called 30 Lessons for Living: Tried-and-True Advice from the Wisest Americans by Dr. Karl Pillemer. This book was the culmination of a five-year research project in which Dr. Pillemer and his staffers interviewed roughly 1000 elderly people, elderly Americans, ages 65 to about 100, and his purpose was to glean valuable life lessons from people who have already lived their lives. We all learn through experience, right, so why not tap into the experience of people who have had the most experience and find out what kind of things work in this life and what kind of things don’t? Now, the book was not written from a Christian perspective so there were some things in the book that I didn’t agree with because they were not rooted in Scripture. However, the generation of people that was interviewed for the book grew up in an American society that was raised to revere the Bible. Pillemer asked these folks about marriage, about parenting, about work, about aging, about happiness, and lots of other things. Like the title says he gleaned 30 life lessons from his discussions.
“Now, if you were to take a guess as to which lesson was the most important lesson that these senior citizens would relate to people younger than themselves, what do you think that lesson would be about? Would it be about marriage? Would be about parenting? Would it be about faith? Interestingly, of all the lessons the elders conveyed, one stood out above all of the rest: don’t spend years in a job that you hate. As Pillemer reports:
You know those nightmares where you are shouting a warning but no sound comes out? Well, that’s the intensity with which the experts wanted to tell younger people that spending years in a job you dislike is a recipe for regret and a tragic mistake. There was no issue about which the experts were more adamant and forceful. Over and over they prefaced their comments with, “If there’s one thing I want your readers to know it’s . . .” From the vantage point of looking back over long experience, wasting around two thousand hours of irretrievable lifetime each year is pure idiocy.
Read more of 30 Lessons for Living…
Robbie Romeiser is a commercial real estate broker, real estate instructor, and author of the daily devotional Today’s Quote From God (www.TodaysQuoteFromGod.com). Desiring to help his own children follow God’s calling in their lives, Robbie founded Career Callings (www.CareerCallings.net) to help people find, prepare for, and pursue the work God has called them to do. To have Robbie speak at your church, business, professional association, or civic club, please email Robbie at robbie@careercallings.net.
