“Find a job you like and you add five days to every week.” ~ H. Jackson Brown Jr., American author
I thought about this quote as I read the profile of Tim O’Reilly in Inc Magazine this month. Tim is known as the Oracle of Silicon Valley and for good reason. He has a way of seeing what’s coming next about 5 years before other really smart people begin to put the pieces together. His road has been unconventional. He’s not a trained businessman, nor is he a trained engineer or tech expert. Trend identification is his specialty. And so is happiness. He’s a keen people watcher and listener. And he’s got an important message for us: work should support what’s important to us in life, not be the axis around which we build every other moment of our days.
“Sure, sure,” we might say. “Get a job we like. Of course everyone wants to do that. But what if I can’t pay my bills by doing what I love? What then?” I’m not sure what Tim would say to that. Maybe he’d just smile. My response would be: “find something else you can really love. Don’t do something you don’t like just to make money. There’s too much fun stuff out there to learn to waste your time doing something you hate.”
I’m not telling you to go out and quit your job tomorrow. Maybe you should do that – actually, you should definitely do that if you absolutely loathe every waking moment at your current job. But if it’s bearable, find a way to make it useful. A project you can start or help out with, a contact who you can cultivate, a skill you can learn. Or switch roles within your company to something that’s of more interest. Or use that energy to actively seek out a new job, quickly.
Truly, I hated the last role I had at work. Starting around October of 2009, I woke up every morning and groaned; that’s when I knew I just couldn’t physically stay where I was. So it was either on to a new adventure in another role, or out into the world to a new company. And once I shared that sentiment with enough people, I found my way to a new role very quickly. Finding the new job wasn’t hard; deciding that it was time for me to get on with it was the tough part.
Once we admit to ourselves that we just can’t keep going down the road we’re on, there’s no turning back. And that can be scary. But if we’re willing to really seek out happiness and satisfaction in our careers, if we’re willing to say “I can do better than this”, then the world has a funny habit of opening the way forward.
The image above is not my own. It can be found here.
Christa Avampato 
