Hey Morris, I’ve been in my job for the past five years. I know I’m not happy but I also don’t know what I’d want to do if I left. I feel lost and stuck. What should I do to get out of this funk?
-Lost in my meh job
Dear Meh,
Towards the end of this post is an answer that generally tells you what you can do to find your purpose. But don’t skip ahead to read that part because it’ll be the expected self-affirming talk along the way that will hopefully make you feel inspired. Before we get there, what I really want you to do is an assessment of you in your current meh-state.
Let’s assess your financial needs and marketability now. Financial needs are pretty simple: do you have enough money to last you 1-2 years without needing another paycheck? If so, then you have a bit of financial freedom. If not, you need to work (or borrow/beg) to secure that freedom.
Assessing marketability is more nuanced. It depends on a wide variety of explicit and hidden factors: how relevant are your skills, how healthy is your industry, how much experience have you had vs. other people. Even your age, gender, sexual orientation, level of education, problem solving skills, creativity, physical appearance, and personality may have an impact on your getting the next job.
Understanding how marketable you are is important for two reasons: it gives you an idea of what you could bring to any new job (mostly soft skills), and it also assesses what your chances are to get a job like your old one back (primarily, job or industry specific experiences and competencies). Ease of cultural fit is also something that you need to assess which applies in both cases.
Assuming that you have the financial freedom and you are marketable, then you can skip to the end to find your purpose. If you don’t have both, then you need to read the next 2 paragraphs.
It’d be a mistake for you to leave your current job just because you feel stuck. Utilize your current job to get the financial freedom you need and at least enough soft skills to start in an entry position in any industry. Better yet, also continue to acquire job or industry competencies that will still be relevant and expected 2 years from the day you leave your job.
By approaching your current job this way, you give yourself a reason to care about what you do… which is to earn your freedom and improve your marketability. Sure, you don’t love your job, but you love yourself. This is a way for you to turn the currently meh situation into something that has a short-term purpose, with the side benefit of ensuring that you aren’t miserable in the future because you’ve run out of money and can’t even get a job like the current one back. We don’t want you to go from Meh to Regretful.
Ok, now the romantic part: finding your purpose, and possibly yourself, in the process.
To do this properly, you need to be patient. It’s unlikely to happen overnight, or else it would have happened already. With the financial freedom you have and the knowledge that you could get at least a job like your current job back, untether yourself from the current situation. Resign respectfully, without burning bridges, and go spend time thinking about what your purpose is. Lots of people say go travel, or go home, or go… whatever, yes yes yes. The important thing is to extract yourself from the current situation, change your physical environment and mental state so that you aren’t repeating the same pattern minus the going to work everyday part. After all, you’re paying for you to live, so get out of bed and your old life so you can start a new one.
When I was in my late 20s, I had the exact same feeling as you. And after I had established financial freedom and understood my marketability, I resigned from Microsoft and to find my purpose for almost 2 years. During that time, I interacted with theater people instead of software engineers, I went to Europe and travelled all over the US, I moved from Seattle down to Los Angeles, and I read books about directing, writing, and cinematography.
I felt my purpose was to make movies, and I had enough soft skills to start as a Production Assistant, which is the entry level position in the film industry. But because I had the financial freedom to give me the time to think, and confidence that I could get a job like my old job back, I eventually came to the realization that making movies was a job–but it wasn’t my purpose. What my purpose was, and still is to this day, is storytelling. Yes, storytelling using movies, but also words, photos, videos, advertising, speeches, presentations, blogs, YouTube… whatever. As long as the story I tell could move, enlighten, entertain, enthrall, inform, educate… and so on, I could be happy.
After I found my purpose, my first job back was similar to the old Microsoft job I had. I was paid well to build software, this time for Ralph Lauren and NBC’s joint venture, Polo.com. Within a short period of time I became the Chief Technology Officer. But when I got there I knew that it’d be my last job as a tech guy, because I wanted to be a storyteller. So when I finished rebuilding Polo.com’s e-commerce platform, I left and began my 2nd career as a storyteller, as a Senior Director of Marketing for Microsoft. Moving from tech into marketing was easy for me because I knew what skills I didn’t have. In my last tech job I actively learned how marketers in the fashion industry told stories about their clothes for each season, and I used that knowledge in my new job as a marketer.
Marketers can be driven by many things: data, product, story, channel, price, competition, brand, etc. I leveraged the fact that I was good in math and knew how to build products to cover the basics, all so that it’d I’d have the opportunities to hone my skills as a brand- and story-driven marketer.
It took me nearly 20 years to transition into the full-fledged storyteller that I am today. But the journey wasn’t painful, and it needn’t be for you either if you start with an honest assessment of your financial needs and marketability.
Is there something else on your mind? Please send it to questions@heymorris.com and I’ll do my best to be helpful in a future post.
Hey Morris 