{"id":1129,"date":"2011-12-30T16:41:53","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T15:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2011-12-31T00:00:10","modified_gmt":"2011-12-30T23:00:10","slug":"hating-a-dream-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/1129\/","title":{"rendered":"Hating a Dream Job"},"content":{"rendered":"

This<\/a> story on the BBC reminded me of something:<\/p>\n

\nDespite having earned millions of dollars and winning eight Grand Slam titles Andre Agassi now admits that he hated tennis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That something James Hamilton wrote about<\/a> a couple of years back, the idea that a highly paid successful sportsman might not actually like his job.\u00a0 It had never occurred to me before, assuming as I’m sure most people do that sportsmen are happily raking in millions as they\u00a0go about living their childhood dreams.\u00a0 But as James says (in a\u00a0post that is well worth reading in its entirety):<\/p>\n

But football draws into it men and women \u2013 more and more of the latter as the game grows \u2013 who are extremely gifted at it, and able to work hard enough to develop that talent, but who aren\u2019t actually interested in it and don\u2019t enjoy it. Fans can miss this, because we all wanted it so badly ourselves as kids (and do you find, as you get past 30, that your fantasies contemplate retirement, your fantasies hang up their boots, your fantasies start taking coaching badges?). But it\u2019s perfectly possible to be international standard at football and not care about the game at all.<\/p>\n

You can live the dream and find it\u2019s your nightmare job; and then you find that no one wants to listen or sympathise. Footballers can\u2019t complain about anything \u2013 all that money! what more could they want? except the things that we all really want and need: an honest day\u2019s work, and then the sleep of the just. But how many footballers fetch up with the sleep of kings?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess I’d never thought of sport as like any other career, which most people\u00a0choose because it happens to be what they are reasonably good at.\u00a0 But it stands to reason, to a point\u00a0anyway.\u00a0 How many people do you know in a well-paid job which they hate, but stick at it because of the money it brings in?\u00a0 I’ve known a few.\u00a0 Of course, the trick is to find a job which you enjoy and pays well, but there’s usually\u00a0queue for them.\u00a0 I’m lucky and\u00a0like my job a lot,\u00a0and it pays very well\u00a0provided you’re prepared to\u00a0live in shitholes and forget about a normal family life.\u00a0 But there are plenty of people who get attracted into law, accountancy, investment banking, and management consulting because of the huge salaries and end up hating it, but don’t know what else to do.\u00a0 That’s the other reason why I’m lucky: I’ve always known I would be an engineer, right from the time when the 3 or 4 tests I took at school each\u00a0spat out\u00a0Mechanical Engineer, Civil Engineer, Electrical Engineer as my first three most suitable careers based on the boxes I’d ticked.\u00a0 In fact, I knew even before that, when I used to take apart anything which could be taken apart to “see how it worked”.\u00a0 I rarely did see how it worked, and whatever it was never did so again.\u00a0 Little has changed.\u00a0 I never said I was a good engineer.\u00a0 Anyway, an awful lot of people take a long time to figure out what they want to do and some never really know, and simply stick to what pays well, or at least enough.<\/p>\n

So why shouldn’t a top sportsman like Agassi find himself in a similar situation?\u00a0 Could he do anything else, and if so, did he know what that was?\u00a0 Having discovered he was brilliant at tennis, did he have time to see what else he was good at before his career took hold of him?\u00a0 For me, it’s one hell of an interesting concept and I’m sure there are far more sportsmen – and probably actors and rock stars too – who hate what they do but are too good at it to stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story on the BBC reminded me of something: Despite having earned millions of dollars and winning eight Grand Slam titles Andre Agassi now admits that he hated tennis. That something James Hamilton wrote about a couple of years back, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1132,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions\/1132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}