3 Reasons to Love Your Stressful Job
If you’ve ever worked through a corporate crisis or otherwise grueling business project, something that requires agressive hours and an always-on, high-stakes mentality, then congratulations! You love what you do enough to help your colleagues accomplish extraordinary feats. And loving what you do is one of the few things in life that can provide you with both happiness and material success.
The more I do this type of work, the more I realize how valuable such projects are to developing and honing regular business and life skills. They increase your professional stamina, the same way running marathons will make running a few miles seem like a walk in the park.
But more than anything these stressful situations teach us about the power of brevity, the importance of accountability and supremacy of ambition.
1. THE POWER OF BREVITY
The moment one of the these situations begins, something interesting happens with email traffic: people’s messages get shorter and more direct. As soon as the high-stakes dynamic is turned on, pleasantries, complex descriptions and flowery “up-fronts” are replaced with just the information needed to advance business objectives.
Brevity filters its way into other things too. People become less concerned with process and more concerned with product. Less concerned with form and more concerned with function. When the stakes are high, people don’t want tours of the sausage factory. They don’t even want to see the ingredients. The just want the sausage.
The communications skills required to work in a crisis can help teach people how to communicate with CEOs and other influential people. When trying to interact with someone more powerful than you, being concise is the key to engagement.
2. DON’T JUST BE PRESENT, BE ACCOUNTABLE
These situations create two groups of people: those who raise their hands to take on more responsibility, and those who don’t. This dichotomy isn’t created by laziness, or indifference, it’s created by those with a sense of ownership, purpose and accountability.
A major problem or challenge creates hundreds of little problems and challenges, each of which needs to be owned, managed and solved. The only way to do this is take complete ownership of your part of the project, both in success and in failure.
In consulting and professional services, this is especially true, and illustrates the biggest difference between the good and the great. Good consultants help their clients with their problems. Great consultants take ownership of their clients problems as if they were their own.
3. AMBITION REIGNS SUPREME
Special situations require long hours, tremendous responsibility, and come with inherent risks. To take them on, and take them on with gusto, you must be ambitious. You have to sacrafice short-term pain for long-term gain. Leaders get to where they are by taking on more than they can handle — by saying yes and stepping forward before they know how they were going to get the job done.
Life affords you a certain number of opportunities, and they usually present themselves in the form of challenges or problems that appear to be insurmountable. One of life’s little secrets is that amazing opportunities often come disguised as problems. The best way to make the most of these opportunities is to take them head on, and use each one as a stepping stone to the next.
In a WSJ article about the legal side of the M&A business George Bason Jr., head of the M&A practice at David Polk, sums it up nicely: “I want business that gives me a splitting headache to do, because I know that work is not going to be commoditized.”
Indeed. It is from these splitting headaches that opportunity is often born.