I think that anyone that is doing what they want to do is successful. If someone wants to be a doctor and they become a doctor they are a success just the same as if someone wants to be a trash man and they become a trash man they are a success.
No job is more important than another I think the janitor who cleans the office of a CEO is has just as important a job as the CEO because I doubt the CEO would clean his own office at night. If a person makes an honest living and they are happy then it doesn’t matter what they do. I had to let that out because I heard this jerk at the car wash imply that he was more important than the guys washing his car because he drove a mercedes and went to college…simply not true.
"e-commerce direct marketing "
Whats more important? Having good health or a clean windshield? Would you rather have a company making products that people use and providing jobs or a clean wastebasket? If you don’t show up to work, does someone a) die b) lose their life savings c) go to jail d) fret that the TPS report might be a day late?
All honest careers are not equally important otherwise we would pay them all the same.
But you don’t judge whether a person is a better person, or a more important person, based on soley their job.
Some people who have important jobs are a waste of humanity and cause lots of distress and pain. Other people who have lowly jobs bring joy to everyone they encounter. The poor guy with the crappy job may have family members who they help support and enlighten, while the guy with the “important” job and the fancy car may have virtually abandoned his family and treats everyone like dirt.
How can we really know who is “more important”? There are all kinds of “important” in this world—on a personal level, on a professional level, and so forth.
So according to you msmith537 a doctor has a more important job than a nurse because he earns more money?
Nurses will probably do more for you than doctors, and by rights should be considered in an equal position to them.
All honest careers may not be equally urgent but are still all equally necessary. I may not die because the trash isn’t taken one week but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna smile after a month. Without your garbage men, your janitors and those guys that wash your car the world simply cannot function. I’d like to see the doctor get to work after his car breaks down without a mechanic.
And really START the argument you make should be that each person is equally important in their own careers rather than the career in question.
My daughter and I were discussing this just the other day. The fact is, jobs do not exist in a vacuum. Sure, a brain surgeon has special training and skills and he can save lives, but what good are his training and skills if he doesn’t have the instruments, which came from a factory, or the electricity provided by the public utility, or the scrubs, made by someone making lots less than he does, or the operating theater, cleaned and maintained by someone who may not have finished grade school…
We’re interdependent to a large degree. How many of us raise our own food, weave our own cloth, dig our own wells, refine our own fuel for the vehicles that we build ourselves?? There is value in any job well done.
As to pay being indicative of the value of the job done, exactly how important is a highly paid football player? Pay is just another aspect of supply and demand. If all the garbage collectors in a city decided they didn’t want to collect garbage any longer, methinks the pay for that job would rise until it became sufficiently attractive to the workforce.
How much you get paid doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the relative importance of your job. There are lots of social workers who get paid dirtballs, and there are star athletes who take home millions of US dollars each year. How much you earn is much more strongly linked to demand for your services than it is to the importance of what you do. There are lots of important jobs for which there’s remarkably little demand (I know a guy who does research into malaria control. He can tell you all about the appalling lack of demand for good work on keeping malaria rates down.) On the other hand, there are lots of relatively unimportant jobs for which there’s tons of demand (think of Brittany Spears or just about any supermodel.)
It is an odd perception we have as a society that someone born into a privileged home, given the best education, all the oportunities money can provide and then admitted as a matter of course to the family business as an executive of some description is somehow “better” than an immigrant who has risked everything to cross borders and do the shittiest jobs just to feed his family.
If the role were reversed, the spoilt scion may do just as the immigrant has or he may not. We shall never know.
The point is, it is just plain WRONG to tag anyone “better” or “worse” based on their station in life.
As to importance, you could argue that the aid worker upon whom many starving children rely is far more important than a president who is merely a figurehead for a mob of self-interests - one who can be replaced with any number of similar figureheads.
But who gets paid the most?
Conveniently enough, the OP’s theory does not address telemarketing, because it concerns only jobs that people WANT to do. And nobody wants to be a telemarketer.
Well, it certainly wasn’t MY first choice when I was doing it. It was better than nothing.
I guess the key line in the OP is “doing what they want to”. I’m gonna go out on limb here and say that more company CEO’s are doing what they want to do, than the people who clean their offices. Some jobs suck and you do them to make money. Some jobs are a lot of fun and you do them because you can’t imagine doing anything else. Most of us exist in the middle somewhere.
As for the discussion of whether a person is “better” or not – it seems as though humans instinctively try to form pecking orders. Although the US is probably almost as class-free as a society gets. Nothing like industrial-Age Britain, for example, where even being a shopkeeper or dealing in commerce was frowned upon. Or the levels of castes in India.
I agree, all jobs are equally important. My brother in law looks down his nose at me because he’s an almighty doctor and I’m a mere engineer, but if he makes a mistake one person might die, a mistake I make might kill people by the hundreds. Supply and demand makes differences in salaries, but it wasn’t for the guy that makes boots for the electrical linemen, Mr. Smarty Pants Doctor wouldn’t have the electricity to work his magical instruments.
That’s why I think kids should be presented with a diverse list of career choices. I was a participant at a Career Day for a middle school a couple of years ago, and I was impressed with the kinds of occupations that were represented. I, the marine biologist, was presented along with an airport security guard, a hotel receptionist, and a big-time banker. Most of the kids at the school were from working-class, immigrant homes. It would not have been practical to expose them only to the doctors, lawyers, and corporate CEOs.
There is a value attached to what people do. I think most people would agree that a doctor’s role in society is more valuable than what a McDonald’s cashier does…if only because their are fewer doctors in the world. But when it comes to respect, for both a person and their line of work, I think we should all be treated the same. I hope that now that I have my Ph.D, I won’t get a big head and think I’m better and more important than others.
I work in a call center. Although I’m not on the main floor, taking the calls which come in every single second our phone lines are open, I handle the “specialized cases”. I have a degree, and most of the call center employees are Welfare to Work, or have barely a high school diploma. I have an office, and the call center employees have their own cubicle. I have a flexible schedule, while the call center employees have to notify the main desk if they need to pee. I get paid substancially more than the call center employees, however, without the call center employees (who handle the majority of the calls), I would not have a paycheck because it is THIER work which brings in the majority of the money for the company. Overall, they handle way more calls than I do, and probably work harder than I do.
If you want to look at the importance in our company, I’d say that the call center employees are the ones who deal with the customer the most (and the first, and quite often, they are the ONLY ones who deal with the customer), who bring in the most money and who work the hardest. However, they’re also lowest on the totem pole in regards to respect, pay and job quality.
monstro Nah, your head won’t get that big. A friend of mine’s wife was getting the electricity set up, and she figured her husband’s title would smooth the way. He’s a Ph.D. in geology. So she called and said she wanted to set up service for Dr. Philips. And they asked, “And is he a real doctor, or just a Ph.D.?” 
As to the OP, I tend to think that people in helping professions have more important jobs than mine (computer programming). I also have a great appreciation for people in the arts; they make life worth living. Farmers, garbage men, and water and sewage people are at the top, for my money. Without them, we’re all dead. And fire fighters are just incredible.
For me, it has nothing to do with the job, or what you have, or what you can buy. It has to do with the kind of person you are. Are you nice to the wait staff at restaurants? Do you have a smile for the person taking your money at the Wal-Mart?
None of those things have ANYTHING to do with what you do for a living. They have to do with how you live your life.
All careers are not equally important.
Some just waste everyone’s time and money and should be eliminated.
For example, if we had a “one payer” health insurance program like Canada,
lots of paper shufflers jobs would go away.
But then they would have to find jobs that actually are more important.
I think the sentence that I bolded is the most important sentence in your post and shows how your focus is off a bit.
Sure, it’s fine to say that a pro athlete is not “more important” than a social worker or the job of being a pro athlete is not a “more important” job than issocial working, where “more important” means significant or praiseworthy in some cosmic sense.
But the simple fact of the matter down here in the real world is that social workers and teachers are paid beans while pro athletes are paid a bunch of money. And you know what this means? It means that we (meaning “society” or “our culture” or what-have-you) value the contribution of pro athletes more than we value the contributions of teachers and social workers. We have decided that we receive more from pro athletes than we receive from social workers and trash men and teachers and store clerks, so we give pro athletes more in return.
So, while you may be correct about the relative “importance” of these jobs and the people that hold them (whatever the word “importance” means), the plain and simple verifiable fact is that doctors and lawyers and pro athletes and CEOs of large corporations and investment bankers and supermodels and actors add more value to society than do social workers and dog catchers and street sweepers and burger flippers and city mayors and help desk professionals and telemarketers and car salesmen, and the way you know this is true is that society pays the former more than the latter.
Note for some of you: this doesn’t mean that I think it’s OK to be mean to burger flippers or that one must bow when a doctor or CEO of a large corporation walks into the room. I hope you understand the distinction I’m trying to make between “importance” and “value added to society.”
I agree with the first two, but the last one made me laugh. The world would function just fine if we all drove dirty cars or had to wash them ourselves.