Stop being mind-numbingly bored at work and feel the pain instead

You stand at a crossroads. You have to decide how to spend the next 18 months of your life. Which is riskier? To throw caution to the wind and quit your job to set off your grand adventure? Or to continue to work moderately hard (with plenty of time for gchat) and hopefully snag that promotion and pay raise? Quitting your job sounds riskier, of course.

Let’s change the question: which has the greatest potential return? If we were asking about risk it’s only fair that we also consider reward. Were you thinking that the job is the choice with the highest reward? After all, if you quit your job, your income is presumably zero. How can you have a higher return making nothing?

The answer depends on your time horizon. If you’re thinking in terms of the next three to six months, you’ll certainly make more money working your job. This is probably true over the next eighteen months as well. But what about over the next twenty years? Is your job really going to bring home the big bucks in the long run? Probably not. The path to riches isn’t working for someone else unless you are a die-hard saver, which chances are, you are not.

Before you berate me about cutting coupons what I’m getting at is this: we often neglect to consider our time horizon when making career choices. We think we are taking the long view when really we are just playing it safe in the short term.

When people leave stable, corporate jobs we often chastise (or envy) them for taking such bold risks and living in the proverbial moment. But we should reconsider. Perhaps these individuals are living for the long term. If they have entrepreneurial ambition, they now have the opportunity to build a business (or several). Are not those of us in our cubicles — only looking forward to Tuesday because it is softball night — the ones who are living in the moment.

An important phrase to consider when people discuss the mundane aspects of their jobs is “mind-numbingly boring”. We need to break this phrase down as this is far more descriptive than merely boring.

First of all, when is numbing a good thing? The dentist, right? When we are having dental work done involving a drill, we are very thankful for the numbing effects of agents like novocaine. But we obviously don’t enjoy the procedure (we hate the dentist after all) we are merely “numb” to it.

This, in essence, is what we are describing with our careers. Our jobs are one 40 hour/week dentist’s chair, where we must numb ourselves and wait for the procedure to come to an end.

Numbing the pain of our jobs is a colossal mistake. This is pain you very much want to feel every day. Forget some quotidian procedure, you should have a visceral reaction to your work (good or bad). If you were in pain you would take action (and not just occasionally bitch to your co-workers at lunch). If you were in pain you would look for a new, better job. If you were in serious pain you wouldn’t give a shit about anything other than stopping the pain and you would quit. You wouldn’t care if the time was right to start that business or if your resume would look better if you had one more activity on it. You wouldn’t spend the time counting the odds and slowly trolling people on LinkedIn. You would take aggressive action.

Don’t continue to sit under the bright light of the cubicle-dentist chair. Stop allowing your mind to go numb. Start feeling the pain.