There are a plenty of reasons that your job can objectively suck:
You’d be smart for citing any of those as reasons for leaving; however, there are a number of self-deceptions we all suffer from that should lead you to question your motives before jumping ship:
What’s the difference between a good life and a good job?
It might seem like a silly question. To a lot of people, having a good job is a big part of having a good life. But to the millions of people with good jobs who are still unhappy, the distinction is critically important.
A lot of people are unhappy in their jobs. In fact, 2.8 million Americans quit their jobs every month.
I’ve written extensively about how you should quit your job, and for many people, that advice is all they need. There is, however, one situation where that advice does not suffice.
Some people are at the perfect company, but in the wrong job.
Walking away from one company and into another is a tricky path to chart, but transferring within the same company can also be like navigating a minefield.
My buddy said to me, “When my mom died, there was only one thing that haunted her.”
It wasn’t the cancer that had ravaged her body. It wasn’t leaving this world.
It was regret. She had been a great mother. A great wife. Had lived a wonderful life, yet, on her death bed, she regretted those things that she didn’t do.
At the time they seemed like the right trade-offs, but looking back, she wished that she had pushed a little harder to do some more things just for herself.
Plenty of research studies of people late in life confirm this common regret, and there are tons of cliches and quotes on this topic, like Mark Twain’s:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Do you sometimes look out at the world and wonder, how did it come to be this way?
Do you look at the way we work and think, who is winning at this?
In the blockbuster book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, offers some answers. And many of them aren’t what you might have thought.
For starters, many of us think that human evolution looks like a straight line in which we graduated from swinging from trees to punching keys, but the origin of our species is far less clear.
The fact is, at different points in time, a number of species of “sapiens” coexisted (ala Lord of The Rings), with all but homo sapiens dying out.
Nobody knows why, nor how seemingly overnight the human brain made an enormous leap in size and cognitive ability (a huge problem for all evolutionary theory).
Relative to dinosaurs that roamed the earth for 165 million years, over merely a couple hundred thousand years our species has evolved, and while evolution has greatly benefitted our species, it hasn’t always been good for us individuals.
An example Harari covers is the Agricultural Revolution which he refers to as history’s biggest fraud.
Whereas the story many of us have come to believe is that humans evolved from hunter gatherers into a more advanced agricultural society, the truth is the opposite.
As he put it, “The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.”
From here Harari goes on to suggest that a similar fraud today impacts the way we work.
He writes, “How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn enough money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five?”
Answering his own question, he writes, “But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and the sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad.”
Referencing devolving back to our origins he asks, “What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”
It doesn’t need to be this way.
We can all do what we want, but only when we stop monkeying around!
Too many of us have settled for too little.
We got a good job, made good money, built a good life, but what have we left behind?
For many of us the struggle is gone, but so too is the fire.
In the orderly nicety that has become our lives, we’ve left behind the chaos of the building.
In our nice homes and neighborhoods we’ve left behind the lack, but also the fear and passion that once ignited us.
The fire that once burned for many people is today barely a cinder.
They might register a heartbeat, but there’s no fire coming alive.
Many of us who once dreamed to change the world settled for being a cog in a machine that is barely turning over.
Many who dreamed to live an extraordinary life stopped once they exceeded ordinary, the “extra” perhaps in reserve for the next lifetime.
We’ve won many battles, but many of us have given up on the war.
We’ve lost sight of what this is about for us.
Lost track of who we are destined to be.
And, many, most tellingly, lost the fire for something more.
We are good family men and women.
Good members of the community. Good friends and workmates.
But how many of us are setting the world on fire?
How many of us are waking up every day and starting our own fire?
How are we dreaming?
How are we striving?
How are we are driving a life where we are giving more?
Doing more?
Being more?
When we reach the end of our lives we will look back on what we did, and who we became.
If you’re reading this, you’ve already achieved a lot, already come so far.
But, if you are like me, my clients, and anyone I want to know, you know there is more in you.
More ambition. More self-belief. More drive. More hunger. More grit.
More fire.
How are you waking up every day and lighting it?
This week Elon Musk unveiled a new “master plan” for his ambitions with Tesla and SolarCity.
Doing so, he said: “Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.”
Don’t you love that?
Someone who knows how “idiotic” his ambitions are, but who only keeps doubling down.
What enables him to do that? What does it take to keep driving your grandest vision for your life?
Well, of course there are many things that can unleash us in life but principally there is one…
A tough one. A real tough one… Stop fear from holding you back.
Look, fear holds us all back. It leads us to question ourselves, to be tentative, to look for the easy way out, and so on, yet it is an emotion we can learn to master.
As I wrote about some time ago in reference to Adam Grant’s fantastic book, Originals.
It’s not that men and women who do remarkable things never suffer from fear, it’s that they are unwilling to let fear dictate their choices.
How do you do this for yourself? Honestly, it’s not easy, and, it can take constant vigilance, yet here are three powerful ways to do it:
If you want to be a Mind Champ at this, I suggest downloading my free e-book to Building Your Limitless Mind.
But, you can also make a lot of progress eradicating fears, simply following these three steps:
1. Ask, what do you possibly have to fear? You do something, it goes wrong, so what? Maybe you lose some money. Maybe you lose some time. But, if the consequences were terribly dire, you wouldn’t be considering it anyways, right?
2. Instead of fearing actions, fear inaction. How would you feel at the end of your life knowing that you played it safe, that there was a dream you failed to pursue, that you left the grandest vision for your life on the table? Fear that feeling!
3. Pull yourself toward the feeling of what it’s like to put fears behind you. How good does it feel to crush a fear? Say, if you were terrified to jump from a high diving board, how do you feel once you’ve done it? Don’t you want more of this feeling?
Candidly, from my research and personal experience, these types of questions are not to be asked once, but constantly, daily, in a life of expanding what is possible for you.
P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.
P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.
We submitted an article to Forbes, and they said, “No.”
My editor said to me, “This is great because they told us exactly what to create, if we want to publish with them.”
I said to him, “Exactly, that’s why I have you on my team.”
You can always choose how you see things, and I need people around me who too see the world through “gold colored glasses.” That is, I need people around me who are good at “reframing.”
A reframe that we are all familiar with is, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” which means, no matter what, you can always find a positive side.
This classic reframe, of the variety, “Don’t see it that way, see it this way,” enables you to change the way that you perceive any and all things.
One of my favorite reframes from NLP is, “There is no such thing as failure, only feedback.” Failure can set you back, but feedback only makes you better.
To some people, reframes are merely tricks of the mind, but in all actuality, the lens through which we see the world is all that matters in our minds.
With the drizzly, overcast weather, you could be bummed out, or walk around feeling like we are one day closer to a real spring.
An injured back could be “the worst” thing in the world, or you could see it is in times of sickness that we truly learn to value our health.
Going to work could be the “last thing” that you want to do, or you could imagine yourself standing in a line with food stamps.
I once read about how, in a certain hospital, the happiest employees were the janitors whose job included emptying bedpans and cleaning up other mess.
When they asked those employees who were doing some of “the worst” jobs, what made them so happy, they consistently said, “We don’t see ourselves as cleaning up mess, but as an essential part of our patients’ care.”
No matter what, you can always reframe, including the ultimate reframe: YOU.
How do you perceive yourself? What do you believe is possible for you? How can you imagine yourself more and more happy changing one way that you perceive you?
For a few moments, sit back and consider, What is the absolute best frame of YOU?
I read a great article (that I can no longer find) by Wharton Professor and best-selling author, Adam Grant.
Discussing his new book on people who champion new ideas and change the world, he provocatively states—when I asked people like Elon Musk and Larry Page about starting their own companies their answers caught me off guard.
As he wrote, “They all felt the same fear of failure that the rest of us do. They just responded to it differently.”
In effect, they don’t allow the fear of failure to hold them back from taking action, but they are more concerned about failing to take action.
In his original Personal Power program recorded some thirty years ago, Tony Robbins talks about the rules we invent for ourselves that govern our lives.
Discussing a corporate training session he was running, he asked the CEO, “Do you consider yourself successful?”
Surprisingly to Tony and the room, he said, “No,” before going on to state his rules for what it means to be successful—I must have more money, less body fat, and so on.
Then Tony turned to another man in the room, a much more junior employee and asked, “Sir, do you think you are successful?” The man immediately responded, “Yes, every day I am above ground I am successful…”
Tony then went on to share his own personal rule for failure—I can only fail if I give up, as long as I keep working at it, I am successful.
Do you see how by just changing a rule you have previously invented that you can change the way you perceive major things in your life?
And, now, here’s the key to this topic of rules.
Just because Tony Robbins or Larry Page or Elon Musk or anyone else live by certain rules doesn’t mean that they are the right rules for you.
It’s up to you what rules you live by, what matters most is that you know the rules you have already set and that you are in charge of changing them.
My friend sent me this video with the note—”I think this is how almost everyone feels except for you…”
I’ve felt it. I get it.
In my last job I took vacation the first week in January because I couldn’t face the week everyone was pretending to get all riled up for the new year…instead I was resigning in the next few weeks…
I had plenty of days at Goldman where I would keep hitting snooze hoping it would somehow get me the day off. But it doesn’t.
You can’t push a button for that. But you can use it.
It was this frustration that motivated me to step back and do the work to transform my own career and life…
It’s not always easy, but when you are clear on what you want and you take steps every day you will get it!
These last two weeks in Vail I’m getting perspective, which for us hard-charging types is not easy to do.
In the last two weeks, I’ve had friends who—
One banker has had an even bigger year than last year, which was by far his biggest year ever. Rather than celebrating, he’s worried about how he will replicate it next year.
Another senior banker had two great job opportunities just show up…
Instead of remembering that a month ago he would have given both of his arms for two options, now he feels weighed down by having to decide.
My oldest friend in the world was struggling with a writing project that she had turned into a big deal instead of seeing this is just one more project in a long string that she has crushed…
And, that, well, relative to the once in a lifetime moments with her nine-year-old daughter at Christmas, that project won’t mean squat six months from now.
Another client has two incredible job offers on his lap…
Guess what? Yep. He would have given both of his legs too for these options, but now he was feeling the angst of having to choose…
That was until he started to see it like having the angst of choosing between a hot blonde and a hot brunette.
Another client has a similar situation…
Two ridiculous job opportunities and instead of punching the air feeling amazing, he’s been all stressed out about how to handle them.
All of them have different situations, but we all have the same problem…
We’re human! We adapt!
No matter how great our lives are, our brains are built to latch onto something to think/worry/obsess about, which blocks us from thinking about what’s amazing in our lives, and smelling what’s around us…
Every moment you can choose to let your brain trick you into not feeling amazing, or find ways to become absorbed in the moment…
Walking through Vail, smelling the cinnamon, that’s what I’m thinking.
Happy holidays!
We all want the same thing.
Everything we want is driven by this goal behind every goal—a feeling.
That’s right. No matter what we want, all we seek is a feeling.
We have different names for it and different ways to describe it, yet everything we want is driven by a feeling.
Often that feeling is a projection of how we expect to feel when we have something—How special will I feel when I get a new car or house or shirt or bag or woman or shoes or whatever?
Yet more often that feeling doesn’t come from “things” but from experiences. Think: Do you want the house or to be enjoying it? Do you want a family or to be experiencing time with them?
Renowned mythologist, writer, and lecturer Joseph Campbell observed that, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.”
Do you feel that? When you think about the times you are most alive, what do you notice about that feeling?
I most readily feel this way when I’m fully absorbed in what I’m doing, when everything else fades away and you’re absorbed in this moment.
This is akin to the state that Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his famous book on happiness and performance, Flow.
Like an athlete in the zone or a runner on a high or a kid playing video games, when we are completely absorbed in what we’re doing, we feel most alive.
I naturally create these experiences writing, skiing, and doing other activities, and I also train this state of mind with meditation, hypnosis, and exercise.
You can also practice reminding yourself of the times you most feel this way, and seek out more experiences that bring you more alive.