How to Find Your Dream Job

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Be prepared to create your job 
While you're thinking big, ask yourself if you're willing to create your dream job if you can't "get" it any other way. And leave yourself open to the idea of a collage of jobs—food writer, cooking workshop leader, cook, restaurant consultant, saxophonist.

List your truest values
What's most important to you? Releasing your creative energies? You may think these things are foremost in your mind, but it's amazing how easily they slip away. Scads of self-help books and articles can provide you with values checklists, but my favorite comes from a simple memory exercise: Recall your life's two or three best moments—when you did what you wanted and were utterly happy, at one with the cosmos, in the groove, fulfilled. Write them down in detail, on paper, then analyze them for content. Were you alone? Using your body? Immersed in thought? In the country, or a foreign city? Now it's easy: Your most important values are the concise statements of what you liked about what you were doing.

Look over the list daily 
Put it somewhere where you can see it, reread it often, and test all your pursuits against it. It just may warn you away from a gig that's convenient, available, and nowhere near good enough.

Tap the power of images 
Clip images from magazines and paste them into a big, colorful composite image of your ideal job and/or life. Or draw and paint them yourself. You're not making fine art, you're creating a vision of your dreams. Put this "map" where you can see it every day.

Make firm commitments 
Nicholas Lore, in The Pathfinder: How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success (Fireside, 1998), writes, "Nothing really spectacular will happen because you want it to or feel passionately about it. It will happen only if you promise that it will be so, and do what is necessary to keep your promise." The difference between "I really ought to go back to school" and "I will enroll in a Photoshop class by the end of the year" is clear.

Take a small step every day
Call one friend who can help you focus your job search. Take one self-help book off its shelf and put it on your desk. Write one vow or affirmation in your notebook. Look up the number of your library's business department and write it down. That's enough for Monday. On Tuesday you'll call a second friend, read one chapter, write another vow, and call the library. If you think this pace is paltry, wait and see what you've accomplished in a week and compare it to a "gotta-do-it-all" week of overambitious inaction.

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