FW: It’s Not You, It’s Me.
“I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.” — Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942)
It’s Time to Dump Your Employer
Cut it off. Dump them. It’s over.
Don’t flip your desk and storm out. But consider this:
Why don’t you view leaving a job in the same way you view leaving a relationship?
When you first found a job, you probably conducted a rigorous search.
Qualifications? Check. Requirements? Hmm… mostly check.
Maybe you got a few recommendations from friends. Or perhaps you found online applications and began to plug and chug. If you were feeling particularly ambitious, you made a spreadsheet to outline the steps of each application, rank your preferences, and apply accordingly.
You may have some nerves about getting a new job, but you know that’s silly. You’re a great candidate and the hiring manager will know you’re the right fit when he looks at those bullets on your resume. Right?
Not really. Hiring isn’t 100% rational. Applicants with a personal connection tend to have a better chance of being hired. It’s possible that a majority of job openings go unpublished because employers already know what they’re looking for, and it’s not a stranger’s resume.
You probably show up to work for a variety of reasons. For starters, you go to work because you’re a member of a team. You show up with your niche of knowledge and apply it. You go to work, give it your all, and repeat it the next day because that’s what you’re paid to do. It’s not always pretty, but that’s your job.
But let’s be real. Your decision to work isn’t 100% rational. On the bad days, it sucks. Sometimes you show up for a paycheck. But you really want to go to work to see friends. You go to do valuable things and in turn feel valuable. Like getting a job, keeping it isn’t a matter of just checking boxes. It’s a matter of feeling.
Staying at a job shouldn’t be 100% rational either. Through the many norms surrounding jobs, we delude ourselves into believing things are simple. Applying, performing, and leaving a job are discussed as though they’re one dimensional checklists. But we’re hardly rational creatures.
For some reason we have no trouble remembering this in relationships. We may feel break ups coming for a while but they’re rarely ‘planned’. They usually culminate in some sort of fight or spontaneous outburst. You break up when it doesn’t feel right. It’s really somewhat simple.
So why not do the same with your job? If anything, you should be pickier and more ruthless with how you select your job than your significant other. Hell, most people spend more time working than dating… Yet we stick around in jobs only until something better comes along. Even when we’re 100% certain it’s time to leave, we give two weeks notice and collect one more paycheck.
If you stayed in a relationship for a designated amount of time to collect a quantifiable amount of benefit, you’d be viewed as a sociopath. Why should your employment plan be any different?
Simply because money is involved doesn’t suddenly make it an impersonal, economics problem. Employment should be a relationship with an open dialogue, just like a ‘normal’ relationship.
I don’t advise crying in your boss’ arms and deleting photos from the company Christmas party. But I think we’ve allowed the pendulum to swing too far in the direction of “professionalism” at the cost of our humanity, our sanity, and our authenticity.
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