Chapter 10 talks about the relationship between successful career life and longevity, which I have a lot to relate to. Growing up, I always wanted to be an independent woman who has her own successful career. Experienced all kinds of uncertainty in friendship and romantic relationship, I thought career life would be a relatively controllable and stable element in my life, which could provide me with a sense of safeness to maintain my independence. According to the longevity project, my emphasis on successful career would not be a wrong choice because greater the dose of success predicts longer life.
At the same time, I had a very high expectation of choosing a career that perfectly matches my personality and interests. And I believed it’s crucial to life satisfaction and longevity. In the past three years, I took a wide range of classes and changed my major three times to make sure I was preparing for the career I truly want in the future. However, it’s found by researchers that a perfect match between personality and job could be a health risk factor. The personality predisposition and the career could reinforce each other, bringing out the stresses and unhealthy habits common to each. I have always valued social categories jobs when I was little and are recently considering to pursue the related career. Fortunately for me, it’s mentioned that one special case where good career-to-personality match was helpful to longevity was the jobs in social categories (including nurses and teacher, etc.)
Even though I valued high performance and successful career, I’ve always concerned about the negative influence of too much pressure on my health. Learned from this chapter, I now know that as long as the pressure is not severe chronic reaction but normal one, it actually contributes to our longevity. It’s good to know because I won’t be hesitate in the future to push myself harder to get what I want while winning a long-living life.
In class, we discussed the Holland’s code career test. When people have contradictory codes, they are less likely to have the most preferable jobs. However, it’s fine because people could use other elements in life such as personal interests and community engagement to compensate the code that is not satisfied by their work.
One reason why career-to-personality match was beneficial to longevity for people who work in social categories is the due to the service-nature and social interaction, instead of the match, because the perfect match between career and personality still is more to lead to burnout.
Hey Minru,
I also thought that people who found careers that didn’t match their personality was linked with longevity. Like I said in class, I think that it is the person’s adaptability that is linked to finding different jobs, and not the actual jobs themselves. Certain jobs are definitely more stressful than others, I still think that jobs are linked with adaptability.