Fashion Your Own Career

The six letter word “career” is one of the most important words and yet also one of the least talked about. According to Wikipedia career is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a person’s “course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life)”. In this definition career is understood to relate to a range of aspects of an individual’s life, learning and work. Career is also frequently understood to relate to the working aspects of an individual’s life e.g. as in career woman. The term career is also used to describe an occupation or a profession that usually involves special training or formal education, and is considered to be a person’s lifework. In this case “a career” is seen as a sequence of related jobs usually pursued within a single industry or sector e.g. “a career in law” or “a career in the building trade”.

There are indeed many definitions of the word career. What is evident in each definition is that career occupies a very important space throughout an individual’s life. Careers are so important that almost always when we speak about success we are actually speaking of successful careers. There is no success in life without a successful career. Take a closer look at life, if you wish, and see if you can identify any one man or woman who was successful and his or her success was not linked to some career.

Many things can be said about careers, but perhaps the most important of them all is that there are no small or unimportant careers. All careers are big and important, but not all people pursuing careers are big minded. The problem is never with the career, but with how people perceive it and pursue it. Ronaldo and Messi are very successful career people in their own right. But what is their career? When you reduce it to the lowest, football is all about adult men chasing and kicking an air-filled animal skin. That’s vain, isn’t it? Excuse us for being dramatic, but that’s exactly what football is. And yet it is a multi-billion dollar industry and many people have fashioned successful careers out of it. George Harding was a successful businessman who made fortunes. His fame and success rest on his invention of the portable toilet. The business that takes place in toilets can hardly be described as honourable, but if you ask George Harding he will tell you that toilet making is not an ignoble career. The world is full of examples of people who became very successful by pushing for excellence and innovation in such mundane tasks as coffin making or street sweeping. This surely should teach us that there are no ignoble careers. Small minded people suffer from misperception and treat their careers as unimportant.

Editor's Comment
Gov’t must rectify recognition of Khama as Kgosi

While it is widely acknowledged that Khama holds the title of Kgosi, the government’s failure to properly gazette his recognition has raised serious concerns about adherence to legal procedures and the credibility of traditional leadership. (See a story elsewhere in this newspaper.) Recent court documents by the Minister for Local Government and Rural Development, Kgotla Autlwetse, shed light on the intricacies of Khama’s recognition process....

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