3 Reasons Why It Pays to Stick to Your Principles to Pursue a Career

There are a bunch of different things you could do with your professional life, and you only need to think back to the stereotypical examples of children’s play and dreams of the future, to identify some of these.

You could be a doctor, a police officer, a firefighter, a teacher — maybe even an explorer or an astronaut.

One thing you’ll tend to notice about the kinds of dreams that children have for their future is that they’re typically based on things the kids think will be meaningful and fulfilling. Not just what they think will be sensible and pay well.

Unfortunately, many of us lose this fundamental approach to our professional lives once we grow up. Here are a few good reasons why it really pays to stick to your principles and pursue a career that is meaningful to you — even if it means a significant course-change from where you are currently.

You’re going to have to work hard in life and experience tough days anyway — they may as well be for something that matters

People sometimes kid themselves that they can find a job that is so cushy and relaxed, that stressful days and hard work simply won’t factor into things at all. Instead, the dream goes, you’ll just do a little bit of work, get paid, and chill out.

Of course, the reality is that hard work, and tough days, are inevitable. But they don’t have to be in service of a career you find fundamentally meaningless and unfulfilling.

Hard work should be justified. You justify it by applying it to things that are meaningful to you — whether that means being a criminal attorney, a police officer, or anything else. Click here for information on pursuing a relevant degree for criminology and policing.

Life satisfaction is largely about a sense of meaning and purpose, rather than material luxuries

Not to be too morbid, but when you end up on your deathbed, as we all eventually will one day, it will be things like your relationships with your loved ones, and the amount of meaningful work you’ve done that you remember and appreciate.

It probably won’t be whether you were a bit better off financially and had a nicer car than the next guy.

A famous saying states that the person who “has a why can bear almost any how”. While the kind of economic and material goods that come with a purely pragmatic approach to career are all well and good, they tend to ring hollow without larger meaning and purpose, too.

Being the kind of person you can respect is perhaps the greatest way of experiencing life on more positive terms

We have to wake up with ourselves every morning, and go to bed with ourselves every night.

If you are the kind of person who you can respect and like, you are far more likely to experience life on more positive terms. In fact, even the fairly miserable bits of life are likely to become far less troublesome.

If you lose your own self-respect, however, things can be a lot worse than they need to be, across the board.