Why You Hate Your Job
For eight hours a day, five days a week, the best years of your life are being sold off.
You hate your “just over broke” j.o.b but not because you don’t want to work — you hate it because it prevents you from being able to use your true capabilities.
This is a problem the baby boomers collectively weren’t equipped to solve and one they’ll never understand.
But you might have a chance and it’s up to you to try.
No Purpose - No Meaning - Just Work
You can feel your brain beginning to atrophy.
The job is a litany of menial tasks and nonsensical deadlines, all for some purpose which no one understands (not even management) –– and it’s getting harder to sleep at night because although you’re earning money, you feel like you’re wasting your life.
Life feels purposeless and this is robbing you of peace.
“Give me a reason to justify my presence here beyond working for a pay check”... you say to yourself.
But nothing changes.
The work itself isn’t difficult, in fact it’s easy.
But the shoddy equipment, managerial incompetence, and office politics, makes it nearly impossible to derive any satisfaction from your efforts.
In many respects this isn’t a career or even a job, it’s a game — one where competence and ability are penalized.
Zero Autonomy
Money isn’t the issue.
You get paid on time, every time, and it more than meets your needs.
So why does it feel like you have nothing to show for it?
Why do you feel poor?
Because you have no autonomy.
Autonomy and authority over the use of your time is the only valuable currency there is, and you’re trading all of yours away for a depreciating hourly wage.
No autonomy at work and no authority at home but all the responsibility and liability…
How did it get to this?
You Don’t Know Yourself
Right from the beginning you followed the “path” as it was laid out before you and never seriously questioned it.
As a result, you’ve never really got to know yourself.
Sure, you’ve daydreamed about “doing something different” but you’ve never truly explored these ideas as potential alternative career paths.
You haven’t made a concerted effort to take them beyond mere pipe dreams and believe in yourself.
As a result, you feel under-developed.
Besides, you’ve taken on major personal and financial obligations which you can’t just back out of without facing serious consequences.
Fear has prevented you from taking decisive action.
This is the source of your despair.
No Mission
You do all the normal things — catching up with friends, going on vacations, wandering through the malls on the weekends buying stuff — but it all feels very superficial.
It’s a surface-level existence.
The real you is buried down underneath.
Your “career” is giving you everything except the sense of progression toward a higher goal — there’s no growth.
Work is just what you have to do to survive, not that there’s any shame in that.
But what are you surviving for?
What is your mission?
You don’t have one and that’s the problem you urgently need to solve.
The Real You
There is very little alignment between your natural talents and abilities versus what you do day-in and day-out for work.
You haven’t seen a way to bridge this gap, so meeting practical needs and trying to live as comfortably as possible has become your focus — and although you’re “successful” in this respect, you know it comes at a cost...
The real you.
Chosen For Non-Conformity
(The Curse Of Inner Strength)
Why are you facing this personal career crisis when others seem to be coasting through life?
Why have you never been able to “get with the program”?
Because using a single skill, to perform a single task, in a single physical place, all day every day, to build someone else’s empire – entrapped with lifelong financial debt to ensure there’s no choice – that was never going to be a sustainable model, not for you nor for society.
You’re just one of the few who’ve always been able to see it.
Others around you who live “normal” lives, disdain your contrarian point of view and call your wisdom folly.
That’s because they find your resistance to social norms – your ability to go against the grain and be yourself – intimidating.
Your existence is a challenge to what they believe to be normal and right.
But little do they realize that you can’t conform, even if you might want to, your conscience won’t allow it.
Yes, having inner strength means you get to live an exceptional life — but you live in the face of constant setbacks, demoralizing difficulty, and very few allies.
That’s what makes it exceptional – isn’t it ironic how it would make an object of envy?
Big Picture
Big changes are underway from which a new order is emerging.
Birth rates are below replacement and the largest and wealthiest generation post World War 2 is leaving the field.
Soon there’ll be less available capital and less people around to produce the goods and services, at the quantity and the quality, which you probably grew up with.
Forget job security – society in its current form is about to become a thing of the past.
But with technology and the generational attitudinal shift toward work that’s underway, you now have the means and the momentum to leverage your abilities across different domains (instead of confining them to one).
The top-down, on-premises, post-industrial corporate paradigm is in decline and the fact that it never embraced you was your blessing, not your curse.
You were chosen for this time.
Seize The Day (While You Still Can)
The opportunity to recover your autonomy and regain control of your life is before you.
But it won’t hang around for long.
The time to act is now.
Here are some important considerations to help you begin…
What are you naturally best at?
Like most people, you have a range of abilities and aptitudes but there’s one or two in which you are strongest. Knowing them is critical for leveraging your time and energy, which becomes essential as you age.What is your personal work style?
What is the way that you must work, which you must build your worklife around, so that you can access your strongest abilities and therefore maximize your effectiveness and potential for success?
You must discover these two things yourself.
Don’t expect the “system” to help, it has no interest in you nor respect for you.
You’ll need to bypass the recruitment agencies and other bureaucracies that exist to commoditize your skills and farm your talent out at falling market rates.
And you’ll need your own plan — your own roadmap to guide you on this journey of forging your own path — to do it.
It’s time to figure out who you are, what you want to do, and how to turn that into a dependable living.
It’s time to become who you were meant to be.
