The Top Four Worst Career Tips Of All Time

It seems that the internet is one big advice engine, churning out tips left and right for those who wish to pay attention. Everywhere you look, someone is willing to offer supposedly sound advice on how to have the best career or land a dream job. While much of this advice is helpful, a few of the most commonly touted tips are simply incorrect, and choosing to follow these tips can actually hinder a promising career instead of help it. So here are the four worst offenders among the bad tip list.

Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow

Do people really believe this? Certainly it can be true. And without a doubt, doing what you love to do will mean you’ll get more work done, as you don’t really view it as work to begin with. Nonetheless, if you aren’t providing an essential service or product, you have little chance of ever developing a sustaining career. Businesses must sale things in order to produce profit. Otherwise, they simply cease to exist. So while this advice may be well intentioned, the fact is that doing what you love doesn’t always equate into automatic success. Thinking so is simply naive.

Plan To Jump Around A Lot During Your Career, From One Job to The Next

Okay, this advice is really about how our economy has evolved in recent years, where freelance and consulting work is beginning to have greater prominence in the business world. Essentially, the traditional career path is dead for most workers. That much is true. What this advice fails to communicate, however, is that simply hopping around from one job to the next isn’t a good thing. While there are extremely motivated and talented people who move to different companies frequently, they do so in order to experience new challenges and not to simply quit because they don’t like working. The problem with the advice above is that it can be used as an excuse for never meeting challenges. When things get too difficult, the worker will simply move on. But refusing to challenge yourself is a path to a career dead end, as you’ll never impress management enough to receive promotions or recognition within your field.

Always Prepare For Your Next Job

This is really terrible advice for one reason: it is impossible for us to predict market changes. Things happen which can have dramatic changes on our current jobs and those to which we aspire. Therefore, it makes little sense to plan ahead for future jobs. While having a career path in mind is beneficial, it shouldn’t be viewed as being set in stone. As a matter of fact, the best advice for today’s business climate is to be as flexible as possible, as you never know how your current duties and responsibilities may evolve. So stop focusing on the jobs of tomorrow when you should instead focus on what you’re doing today. That is the only thing you have any control over at this time.

Do What Pays The Most Money

While earning extra money can seem especially appealing when you are currently cash poor, it really doesn’t look that way after you’ve saved for a couple of years and then you realize you hate your job. A miserable job can never be mitigated by higher pay. While workers will inevitably be attracted to such positions, high turnover rate is still inevitable. If you choose to do something you hate, no matter how much you may appreciate the monetary rewards, you will still perform the job poorly. Simply put, human beings aren’t made to spend forty or more hours a week doing things which they absolutely hate. It can have detrimental impacts on your emotional, mental, and physical well-being as well, since depression is often the result of enduring such an occupation. So why put yourself through all that misery for a few more dollars?