Choosing a career can be a tiring process. It is always advised that you choose a career you’d love to build and work in and not just merely toil to earn a living.

It is very different from choosing a job. Your career is what you will be doing for the rest of your life. This decision has to be taken wisely. Otherwise you’ll be stuck doing something you do not love and this is dangerous. You cannot grow with something you absolutely have no liking for and only do it because you have to.

To have a successful & healthy career ahead, here are 5 tips to consider before you choose your career:

1. Your Happiness

Happiness comes when you are satisfied with what you do. Without job satisfaction, your work will seem like a burden to you. Make sure you do only what you love and not what you are ‘supposed to love’.

Thus, pursuing something you are truly interested in is the first step towards building a successful career.

2. Identify your Skills

Before you go out there hunting for the right career, know the skills you possess. This will help you get a good knowledge about both your weaknesses and strengths.

Every career requires a different skill set. Knowing every skill that you have, even the ones that don’t seem to be that marketable, can help you get a job and career you always dreamt of building.

3. Determine your Goals

It is necessary to have concrete goals in life to reach the peak of success. Without goals and aspirations you’d be nothing more than just some wanna-be.

It’s ok to dream but to turn them into reality you need to have your actions planned before you execute them to reach the ultimate goal.

4. Assess your Priorities

It is very important to understand priorities and work towards them. For someone it can be money’ for another, it can be a powerful position. So define your priorities in life and define them well. Do not get caught up in every little thing and prioritizing it. You need to draw a clear line between what is important and what is priority.

For example, buying a car can be important but priority can be to pay the mortgage. This stands true even more when it comes to choosing a career. Unless you know the priority you are working for, you will not have any fruitful outcome.

5. Be Flexible

When you realise you’ve actually invested a lot of time and money into training for a particular career you are not interested in, it is easy to get into a denial mode.

There are a lot people who settle for less just because they had been trying for really long to get something they’d always wanted and haven’t been able to get it. So they settle in a career/job that doesn’t satisfy them.

Be flexible about your thoughts and wants. Look at the bigger picture always.

If you think a couple of extra years in college will help you learn better, do that. There’s no race and you do not have to follow what others are doing.