Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Recently I was talking with a friend who was looking for a job. When I asked him what he was looking for, he said, “I want a job that I’m passionate about, that uses my gifts, pays well, and is in a spot I want to live in.”

That’s the dream.

The reality is, though, while some of us hit the jackpot and get all that we want in a job, most of us won’t get it all. 

Imagine that you are sitting at a table. All your dreams for a job are in the middle of the table. Things like location, salary, and proximity to family and friends. It might be the prestige of the church or company, size of the church, benefits, schools, desire of your family to be there, the pace of life, lining up philosophically with the church or company and other things. 

Now, you won’t get all of those things. 

Your opinion might shift over time. Maybe you start not liking the city, but it slowly grows on you, or you join a startup that doesn’t pay very well, but as it grows, it starts to. 

One of the exercises that Katie and I discussed when we decided to leave Tucson was determining what we were willing to not get in a job. 

This was incredibly clarifying for us. 

As we talked with churches, we knew which things we could live without or were willing to leave on the table and which things we couldn’t live without. 

This does a couple of things:

• It helps you narrow down which job to take. 
• When you leave something on the table, you will not be frustrated later because you intentionally left it on the table. 

Too often, in a job search, we only focus on what we want or are hoping to get. The opposite is beneficial: what will you live without.