If you ask Miquel Laborde Pelegrí (47), “What do you do?”, he will say without hesitation: “I am a musician.” In truth, he always was. But he never lived from that. “If I could have, I would have dedicated myself to music from minute one, but it didn't give me enough to eat. You were going to play and with luck they offered you 30 euros. I had to look for something alternative and continue there,” he explains to La Vanguardia.
If you type his name into Google, the search engine will return several economic articles - many from this newspaper - where Miquel Laborde Pelegrí, founding partner since 2009 of the real estate advisory and wealth management company Laborde Marcet, appears as a source consulted as an expert in the real estate sector. If, however, you search for him as “Micky Laborde”, he will appear as the voice and guitar of the group he created with Jordi Pegenaute, “Soyla” (on Instagram, @soylabanda). “There are people who cannot understand that someone advises families on their real estate investments and then you can find me in a room playing on my knees,” says the businessman/musician.
This will be the first time that Miquel Laborde Pelegrí will appear in this newspaper in a section other than Economy. “This is what I really want to talk about, which is what comes from my being, from my heart and my guts. The other thing is very nice, but it is only a means to an end,” he confesses.
What happens when our work does not coincide with our vocation? Can you find satisfaction in a job that is neither more nor less than a means of subsistence? “After a long time of working drawing as a designer and publicist; "Many years of fighting with myself, trying to figure out what my vocation was, I was finally able to discover that this was my thing," says tattoo artist Martín Calabria (37) and points out: "When you find what is your thing, it is complicated and frustrating to have to do "other things to live."
Etching his illustrations onto his clients' skin is his calling, but that's not what pays most of his bills. To make ends meet he also has to work at the front desk of a restaurant and work overtime in hospitality. “In Barcelona there are many tattoo artists and it is very difficult to get to work in a studio. Many of us do it on our own and it is difficult. The clients that come to you are through word of mouth or Instagram. You always have to be doing something extra on the outside. I estimate that it is something that happens to many cartoonists, to people who dedicate themselves to the arts, to cinema, to writing… It is complicated,” she indicates.
Martín feels like “a nonsense” to have to invest time in a job that does not motivate him. “Since it is only for money, it feels like a waste of time. And I think it dampens the creative part a lot. It's frustrating to arrive tired and know that the next day, when you have to draw and tattoo, you won't have the energy for it,” says Calabria.
The social psychologist José Navarro Cid, professor of Work and Organizational Psychology and PhD from the University of Barcelona (UB), explains that having a vocation is more of an exception than the rule. “It is difficult to find people with a vocation, in almost any profession, because the labor market is very dynamic and job expectations are not always positive. This is due to the current market we have, in which finding work and finding good jobs is not easy,” says the expert.
As he observes, “a very important part of people do not have a vocation, in the sense of an unconditional love or preference for a job that they have been able to develop later.” For him, “most people have a more commercial or economic relationship with work, as a means to an end.”
This - Navarro Cid points out - “influences the worker's motivation. If we have a person who likes his job, but who cannot really make a living from it, it is clear that if he could make a living from his work, he would be more motivated and would surely perform better. It is a wasted motivation.”
On the other hand, he assures that “vocations are a little mythologized. In reality, you don't know if you like a job or not until you start doing it. “It's like the myth of romantic love… there is also a lot of fantasy about vocations.”
“With the excuse of passion, sometimes many things are let go, but a job is still a means to live,” says Leyre Flamarique. After completing a degree in psychology, she completed a master's degree that opened the doors to her true vocation: journalism. “I saw that I loved this, that I was quite good at it, that it was my thing,” she explains. But the working conditions she found in the sector ended up diluting that illusion.
The outlook was not very encouraging: working as a false self-employed person or as a collaborator and, with luck, aspiring to earn around a thousand euros a month in cash. “I returned to my parents' house and spent several months using savings, until I decided to switch from journalism to communication. Now I am in a scientific communication agency,” says the journalist.
Leyre has seen his situation reflected in many other colleagues: “Three years ago, while I was looking for a shared room in Madrid, of the ten apartments I visited, in nine of them there was someone who had studied journalism and who did not practice it, for the conditions that are offered,” he says.
“You find more and more situations that reflect this gig economy, which is having to do several different jobs as freelancers to end up having an average decent salary,” says social psychologist José Navarro Cid. As he explains, “this model, which is now widespread in many areas, has to do with the maximum liberalization of the economy and little interest in the protection of workers' rights. Basically, it means having to bear the costs of the worker's contributions and not have them paid by the company.”
For the expert, “this has consequences and affects the motivation that these workers have, since in the end they will be strictly economic motivations, to earn a living. And they will not go further to pursue what work should really be: a means of expressing the talents that people have, places where people find that they contribute something and not just receive something in return, money for doing a job. job".
When María José Hepp (27) left her job at an agency last year, she decided to explore the possibility of devoting herself to what she really loves, which is also journalism. Theirs is an inherited love: her grandparents were journalists in Chile, her country of origin.
Before embarking on trying her luck in journalism in Spain, María José Hepp met with about ten journalists. “Most of the people I spoke to had a second job. As a Community Manager, for example. They warned me that it was not going to be easy. I don't think I've ever heard the word 'precarious' so much. That disappointed me a lot,” she says.
That survey discouraged her. A few months later, she took a new job at another agency. Although her conditions give her security, she feels that something doesn't quite fit. “I feel like the corporate world doesn't make me happy. "I continue looking for how to apply communication, which is what I love, in a job that allows me to live but at the same time gives me a purpose, something more related to the social or the world of NGOs," she says.
The therapist specialized in migratory grief, Gabriela Giménez, observes that precariousness and loss of status on a social and professional level is something especially common in people who migrate. “That is why it is important to prepare, approve the degrees, create a network and make your way towards where you want to advance at a professional level, knowing that there will be challenges,” she points out.
“It's a whole process that can take more or less time,” says the therapist and adds: “I think the way to fit better professionally in the new destination is to train and try. Sometimes, it also means mourning for what was not given to us.”
“The relationship between vocation and precarious working conditions is an important aspect that affects many people. It may be the case that you are very good at painting and you say: 'I'm not going to make a living with painting.' I know philosophers working on boards of directors and painters who are doing team buildings for organizations,” says Manel Fernández Jaria, collaborating professor at the UOC's Economics and Business Studies and Specialist in Leadership and Team Cohesion.
“When you have internal dissonance, which tells you that you are not right in what you are doing, it is time to explore other options. It is not very sustainable to spend eight hours earning a living and then eight hours in the afternoon putting together what you messed up in the morning," says Fernández Jaria, and points out: "I always propose to approach it based on the Japanese concept Ikigai, or ' "the reason for being', which is the intersection between what you love, your talent, what the world needs and what you can be paid for."
When the time comes to materialize that vocation, says the expert, “you have to be mentally prepared, because many people become discouraged. It is important not to despair or fall into frustration. Every training you do can open a window of opportunity. And then everything is like a ball. But it is difficult if we face it from frustration.”
He understands that “if you have an open mind and approach it with a searching attitude and a desire to explore, it will be much easier to find how to materialize that purpose and turn it into a profession. It also helps a lot to surround yourself with people who can support you, with mentors who can give you clues on how to develop that vocation and, above all, in times of change you have to explore while always maintaining a safety net.
“Life is opportunities, you don't have to get obsessed either. Stones appear on the path and you have to decide whether to jump over them or go around them. Sometimes it is better to skirt them and not try to jump over them,” says Manel Montero (45), general director of Grupo Moure. He is “one of those lawyers who has never practiced.” He would also have loved to turn his passion, cycling, into a profession.
But everything was fitting into his life in different ways and today he couldn't imagine living without some of all those pieces. The legal knowledge, which he never used in an office, has served to enhance his commercial activity. The bicycle, which occupies a place of hobby, is also an engine to perform better at work.
“I couldn't live without those things together. They need each other,” explains Montero. Not to practice it professionally, cycling is something that is taken quite seriously: last year he did a route through the Alps, with peaks of 3000 meters above sea level and stages with 4000 meters of positive gradient.
Miquel Laborde Pelegrí dedicates more time to music than to his paid job. “I play on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The weekend too,” he says. Tuesday and Wednesday he goes to the office. But music doesn't just consume a lot of his time. “At the moment, it only gives me a lot of expenses. You have to pay to play,” he explains.
His company has become not only a means to cover his family's expenses, but also to support his vocation. “I'm lucky that the consultancy works very well, because it means taking the money it gives me so I can dedicate it to music,” he says and adds: “Many times I think that perhaps the gift that life has given me is being able to play with the people I play, learning from them every day and being able to make this music; That every time we go live, people think: 'How do these bastards play!'"
