The Travelling Bra Salesman's Lesson

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Since the inception of civilization, people have dedicated themselves to certain practices to obtain needed supplies. With the advancement of society, these practices have specialized into roles that society needed and have become jobs and careers. With these jobs and careers, people have struggled to find a difference between the two, if there is one. However, the two are very different. There are a multitude of differences between a job and a career, but the most distinct differences being the necessary skill, and dedication needed. The amount of skill that is needed to work efficiently and be successful is vastly different in a job than it is a career. Anybody can get into a job, as they are simple and easy to get the hang of most of the …show more content…

For example, in Claudia O’Keefe’s The Travelling Bra Salesman’s Lesson, she tells the reader her first job, “my job was to sort and count the [price] tags, at a nickel for every hundred” (O’Keefe 205). The author’s anecdote serves to show the reader what a job is like. The author was able to complete this task easily with minimum difficulty. Later in her essay, she talks about her career as an author. An author is a career that requires a great amount of skill to be successful in. Writing as an author requires a deep understanding of the English language as well as the literary devices involved and the effective use of them. Compare this profession to the former one, and the differences in the amount of skill needed are obvious. Counting and separating tags is a job requires little skill, and can easily picked up by anyone. However, a career writing at an author’s level requires a great amount of skill that many do not possess. Another example would be in Thomas Carlyle’s essay, Labour, where he mentions that those with skill would be rewarded, proven by, “the knowledge [skill] that will hold good in …show more content…

One does not need a great deal of dedication to maintain their job. O’Keefe mentions in her essay that the only requirement for maintaining a job is to able to take a pay cut, proven by her statement, “Americans who have lost their jobs…are having to adjust to the idea that the next [job] they find is likely to involve a pay cut” (O’Keefe 207). This shows the reader that it is not necessary to devote large amounts of their time or energy to maintaining or getting a job. O’Keefe also talks about how she tried to maintain her career as an author, and how much she had to dedicate to maintain her career. O’Keefe states that, “I sought to adjust to my shrinking income by progressively relocating to areas of the country with cheaper…costs of living” (O’Keefe 207). O’Keefe shows the reader that in trying to maintain her career as an author she had to not only deal with the pay cuts, but she had to relocate several times to try and keep her career afloat. The dedication that is required to maintain a job is lower than the dedication required to maintain a career, as proven by O’Keefe. A career takes more resources like time and energy to keep afloat than a job which can only require taking a pay

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