Defining a good life and personal achievement strategies

¶ … GOOD LIFE

The concept of the "good life" is defined by several different issues. More specifically, living a good life means fulfilling one's personal needs, those of the members of one's immediate and extended family, and contributing in some way to the wider good of others in the human community. In the near future, that means completing my education, securing a good job in my chosen professional field, finding a person to spend my life with, starting a family, and establishing everything necessary to meet the needs and guarantee the future happiness of my family. Ultimately, I anticipate that working in the hospitality industry will allow me to achieve all of these goals in both the long and short-term.

Educational Success

I recognize that the first important step toward establishing a good life for myself consists on completing my education and achieving good enough grades to compete successfully in a job market that is much tighter than it was before the ongoing current economic recession in the United States. Unfortunately, the recession has affected my future professional industry quite heavily because the hospitality industry obviously provides a nonessential commodity that is, understandably, one of the first areas that many people must cut back on in times of economic instability. Beyond merely achieving the best grades that I possibly can, I am also using my educational opportunity to improve all of my professional skills in general, so that I will be capable of working in other industries as well, should that ever become a necessity.

Professional Aspirations

One of the most important components of a good life is a stable and prosperous profession. While I do not believe that accumulating money or material possessions are especially important in the overall scheme of what it means to live a good life, I also do recognize that economic realities mean that maintaining a comfortable and stable life for my family requires a certain amount of financial resources. That concern is also a significant consideration in connection with establishing the necessary savings for the future educational needs of my children, because both the cost of a college and the relative importance of completing a college degree are ever increasing.

Meanwhile, all the money in the world cannot bring happiness if earning it absorbs too much time or requires so much effort that one lacks sufficient energy to enjoy the good life. Toward that end, my professional goal is to work hard enough early in my career to be able to devote less time to work and more time to my family and private life once I am established in my profession.

Another component to the good life is the amount of time one can actually spend at home. In that respect, the contemporary trend in many elements of my industry (and many others) is for business professionals to spend more time working remotely from their home offices and less time working in traditional office environments. I am particularly looking forward to that aspect of my chosen profession because so many of the transactions within the modern hospitality industry are now conducted electronically rather than in the traditional face-to-face business environment.

Contribution to the Community and to the Greater Good

On one hand, I recognize that my chosen profession is not one that necessarily contributes directly to the most important needs of society, such as is the case in fields such as medicine, or scientific research, or social work, or government service. On the other hand, my chosen industry does provide the services that most people regard as the most meaningful pleasures in their lives. Most people, even those whose work involves the most important things in society value their leisure time and the quality time they spend with their families, and away from their work, as the most important and memorable parts of their lives in the long run. In that respect, the hospitality industry does provide an extremely valuable service to society. Besides wedding and graduation photographs, the average family remembers their lives more through photographs of family vacations than of anything else; and even weddings and honeymoons also rely on the hospitality industry in very large part.