Maybe I am biased because Katie is my bff, but I thought her Career Confidential answers were filled with such valuable gems that I decided to break it up into two parts (check out part 1 here). I just couldn’t bring myself to edit it down and risk the chance of missing some real advice.
We are all trying to figure out how to balance all the things we love in life. In Katie’s Career Confidential: Part Deux, she gets deep with the age old question: is it more important (and realistic) to work for money or do something you love? Check it out below!
Full name: Katie Amey
Position / Job title: Contributor, RealBeauty.com (Hearst Digital Media)
1. If you could look into a crystal ball and see 20 years into your future, what would you want to see? I want to feel like I have had experiences that I will look back on fondly. It’s not enough for me just to be a high-powered magazine editor (although, that would be awesome, too!), it’s important to have life experiences. I want to be able to look back and tell my kids about my life before them and have them say, ‘My mom was kind of fucking awesome.’
For me, that means traveling and living and working elsewhere. A dream of mine (one that I hope to someday turn into a reality, so wish me luck) is to work in London. And Paris, but let’s be real, my French sucks.
Having a family life is important to me – one of the reasons I don’t know that I can stay in New York – and I always have to remember that as amazing as your career may be, a career won’t take care of you when you’re elderly and really, it won’t matter in the end.
2. Should you work for the money, or do what you love? I think it is extremely naïve when people say that you should do what you love because money doesn’t matter. Who the hell are you? A fucking Rockefeller? Um, the rest of the world has to work to support themselves, thanks.
There is such a difference between making enough money to live and being rich. I think that making enough money to support yourself and your lifestyle is undeniably key. In some industries, you are probably never going to be rich. (Barring you becoming the next Anna Wintour, that is.) But you will, in time, make enough to support yourself and have a decent living. Do I think you should only take a job to make bank if you can’t stand it? No. But do I think that you should do something you love and go into debt for it? Of course not.
The dream is to find a career that allows you to support yourself, but is also something you enjoy doing. But keep in mind, that’s what hobbies are for too – and maybe you have to take that job as a social media manager for a financial firm to pay rent, but that doesn’t mean you can’t fulfill your lifelong dream of being a DJ at night. And maybe that DJ-ing gig will lead to a full-time job, but if not, at least you didn’t go into debt to the tune of $20k trying to make it happen.
3. If you married a millionaire husband and didn’t have to work, would you? (Be honest.) I am SO glad this is a question because this is something that I joke about all the time and now I can set the record straight and have it in print: NO!
Look, I would love to marry someone who is successful – note: I did not say a millionaire, I said successful. What I want to find is a guy who is passionate about what he does and is good at it. Ambition and success are sexy. If that means he becomes a millionaire at 30, more power to him, but I would never want to be dependent on someone else for my financial security and well-being. Any woman who says that is fooling herself and will wind up being fucked over in the end.
No guy worth having wants to date a woman who doesn’t have her own shit going on. Something I’ve learned from these successful men (who, yes, probably have some family millions) is that they want a woman who is their equal and who is driven, has her shit together, and can intelligently discuss the things that he is interested in. Trophy wives are so passé. If you get married and decide you don’t want to work for your own reasons and find something else that you love doing, then that’s one thing. But if you’re only doing a job so long as you have to because you hope you can quit one day when you get married, I can’t see that ending well.
PS: I hope she doesn’t kill me for using this awesome pic from the time we stole robes from the Four Seasons…a story for another time.
Leave a Reply