A little more hairspray, please!

Scott Baradell over on Marketing Profs had a delightful post the other day in which he laid out the seven reasons why he thinks hairdressers are the world's happiest workers. You need to read Scott for the full deal here, but in quick summary, Scott suggests that hairdressers are happy because its a profession that let's you:

1. Be yourself
2. Be creative
3. Set short term goals
4. Be social
5. Form relationships
6. Take ownership
7. Not make work about the money

On that final point, it's worth quoting Scott:

Once you start making career decisions based on where the dollars are, rather than where your heart is, you've pretty much guaranteed yourself a life of unhappiness at work.

Scott's list is a good one, but I thought I'd add a few more of my own.  If you're a hairdresser:

• You don't take your work home with you. Sure, you might bring a few styling magazines home, and your husband or kids might get an occasional trim, but once you walk out the door, your life's your own. No e-mails, no paperwork, no IMs.
• There are no firedrills. I do understand that there can be such a thing as a hair emergency, and it's certainly possible that you could get called in to get the bride's hair right at the last moment. But it's hard for me to conceive of a top-drown firedrill in which everybody in the shop gets thrown into a frenzy because the boss has a brain spasm.
• Mistakes aren't that costly. I know that my sister Trish might argue with this point, since she was once the victim of a bad highlights job that turned her hair pink, but even if someone just hates what you've done to them, it'll grow out. Not so bad decisions made at work, where it's definitely possible to screw up a product, account, deal, project - and it can cost your firm a lot of money.
• You make tips. Having been a waitress I know that there is something highly satisfying about adding up your tips at the end of the evening and being able to figure out whether it was a good day at work.
• You get to look at trashy magazines during your downtime. For years, my guilty pleasure when I was on a business trip was picking up a copy of People and a bag of M&M's and sitting in my hotel bed, in a strange faraway city, reading about George Clooney, Princess Di, and someone in Florida who was eaten by an alligator. Hairdressers have People and Us right there in front of them. They don't even have to buy it for themselves.

The only downsides, as far as I can tell, are having to work with chemicals and sweep up hair.

I will note, however, that I had an interesting conversation the other day with my incredibly wonderful hairdresser, Rita (for whom I have my sister Kathleen to thank). Rita's older daughter will be starting college in the fall, but one of her daughter's friends has decided to go to cosmetology school. Although she loves her profession, and is great at it, Rita doesn't think that this is such a good idea. It's too hard, she told me, when you're starting out, too many years at the low-end while your build your business up, not enough payoff once you do.

She is hoping that her daughter's friend changes her mind. Not going to college, Rita fears, means that this girl will miss out on the learning, the relationships, the experiences that Rita wants for her girls. Something that she didn't have.

Still, for Rita, it has been a good career.

And Scott's list is worth all of us looking at when we think about what we want from ours.