Have you ever sat down and had a long hard look at your career? How did you get there? Where to next? What have you achieved? What are you going to achieve next?
I have a long working career behind me (I won’t say how long as that might give my age away!) and I’m often drawn into my self reflections. In my pursuit for happiness I always ask myself “Am I doing what I love?”
Over the years, especially the awkward young adult new to the world stage, I can’t say I loved what I was doing. I was still finding myself and wasn’t paying much attention to what I enjoyed and what I was good at. I got caught up in the action and just got the job done. It was only a bit later in life, as obviously age gives us a huge amount of wisdom, that I started to consider myself. I went through the where to next, what now and what should I be doing scenarios and quite by accident I stumbled on what I love. As Confucius says “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life”. For years I treated this little pearl of wisdom as yeah, yeah whatever. Clearly he had no idea about working!
But once you get there it’s pretty darn great!
So it might sound a bit weird…yep, but working with words is really what I love doing. I know, I know…of course she’s going to say that as she’s plugging her services. Well a bit of a shameful yes, but also a resounding no…I truly am doing what I love.
This long, journey was a bit of a happy accident quite frankly. How I got here was a bit strange, but I was obviously meant to. My career really got off the ground in my 11 years in the UK – I was given amazing opportunities that I just ran with and taught myself a lot in that time. About 80% of my career has been in publishing – which was a chosen industry on my behalf. Throughout my years in marketing, working in publishing involved many other things besides just marketing my product. I was involved in content creation, copywriting, editing and proofreading. These were all part of a bigger role. Our Managing Editor always used to call me the ‘eagle eye’ as I was a pretty good spotter!
Years went by and in every single role I was heavily involved in communications and my lifelong passion, the written word. This little fling I’ve had, dates way back to my school years…and yes I can remember them! I wasn’t particularly studious at school, but English always captured my imagination and I would spend hours crafting and learning.
After having a child we decided to move back to South Africa and this is where things really started to change for me. I was presented with freelance opportunities involving content management, content creation, proofreading and copywriting all under the marketing umbrella. At first I approached it in a very typical marketing manner, but soon came to realise that it wasn’t quite the same. Without me even realising it, I made a transition from pure marketing to a content driven role – which involved the written word. It kind of snuck up behind me and whacked me on the head before I realised that this is what I really enjoy. As I kept getting repeat jobs, I assumed that I was pretty good at it.
Marketing still underpins the very nature of content, so I happily get to do my written word work, sprinkled affectionately with a good dose of marketing skill and expertise.
That’s my happy accident journey – I would love to hear from you how you landed up where you are and if you’re doing what you love?
I always think of one thing…we only have one life and we better live it well!
Cape Town Proofreader 
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