MY PHILOSOPHY

Your current job bores, and exhausts you. The work you are doing means little to you or anybody else. Your life is shaped around your work with little room for relationships or creative projects. You dream of more. You are jealous of people who seem to have freedom to do what they want, people who have their own businesses, are freelancers or earn money in quirky and unconventional ways but that feels so far away for you. You’ve thought about it for a long time, imagining possibilities of different lives, only to be plagued by uncertainty and fears: What will other people think if I quit this high status job? What if I fail? How will I support myself or the family I have or want to have? What if it doesn’t work out? What do I even do next? You might have already changed jobs, quit or taken a sabbatical hoping that will change how you feel. You are stuck, confused and frustrated with yourself and the careers and financial complex you are playing in, trapped in a corporate world without a door out, knowing that it exists, hoping it exists for you. 

 

For most of us, our work story follows a script. It defaults to the next obvious thing as we follow a pre-set path created by the industrial revolution designed to produce high efficiency workers. We go to school where we progress from grade to grade. Pick an area of interest (your was mostly likely computer science or a related field) and go to college/uni to pursue a degree in it, in the hopes of landing a good job. Based on the area of interest and the school we attend we have a set of “good jobs” at “good companies” to choose from to apply to. We then work at a company moving our way up from junior to senior to manager, all within the same basic story, until we are promoted to somewhere right above our competency. Job changes happen but the story stays the same. 

 

Like the relationship escalator, the work escalator is not a bad one to get on and ride to the top—but only if we consciously choose it. The trouble comes in when we realize we are on the escalator but no longer want to be on it, and we have no other way of figuring out what to do. For the first time in your life you’re realizing you don’t have a script or a “next obvious thing to do” when it comes to your work choices. There isn’t a clear way to progress, and you feel lost. You’ve never had to wayfind your way through your own work desires. 

 

Work is also a huge part of our identity and putting what you’ve been doing in question is a monumental decision point. Who are you if you’re not a developer? Or a data scientist? What do you say when people ask what you do? It’s like you’ve climbed to the top of a cliff, following the steps and are now standing in front of a beautiful open vista, choosing between stepping forward into the unknown or going back to follow the old familiar steps. 

 

There is a fork in the road here, one where you choose to do nothing and one where you choose to do something different. Doing Nothing will maintain the status quo. It’ll mean stuffing down the part of yourself that is craving a different life. The results of that will differ between people,  but this can lead to increased apathy and disassociation from yourself and your desires. It can also lead to a festering resentment of the people you’re working with, “the system” and yourself, growing into anger that boils right under the surface. These feelings often manifest in the body as unexplained aches and pains. Most likely Doing Nothing will result in what is commonly known as burn out. You’ll take time off/go on vacation and come back to work still resentful, only dealing with the symptoms and not the underlying cause of your pain. In the most dramatic case, you’ll wonder in 30 years whose life you ended up living, because it wasn’t the one you wanted. 

 

The other path, Doing Something (and ongoingly choosing to Do Something) leads to a life where your work is a life-giving part of your life, along with your projects and relationships. In this future, all parts of your life are mutually beneficial and support each other with abundance. Work fits your life, not the other way around. You feel fulfilled and energised by most of your work most of the time, helping other people in tangible ways with others who are aligned with your values. You have the money to live a satisfying life, where your needs, and the needs of people you care about, are fulfilled. You have the energy to pursue fun creative projects like writing, drawing, comedy, singing that express parts of you, you didn’t even know about. You have a sense of purpose and trust in your own choices. You know how you are and what you want even as your life changes and you can adapt to these changes as they happen. 

 

The great news is that you’re the expert in your own experience and writing your own work story is not rocket science. The basic prerequisites are self-awareness, curiosity and courage. The process is not easy but it is simple. It’s a process of reflecting and acting on the insights in an iterative loop. Not getting stuck in one over the other but constantly iterating between them. The intention is to first develop an understanding of what you want based on what you already know about yourself, and then to put that understanding into action with small, safe-to-fail experiments to test your assumptions, create momentum and build confidence. 

 

The design of the two stages has two essential components: