Your Job is a Relationship
why not treat it like one?
Recently, I’ve had a number of people ask advice about jobs, or ask about how I ended up in the line of work I am in. Every time I talk with someone about this topic, I end up landing on the same core concept which lies behind the way to choose any job you end up choosing, which is that I think you should treat your job the same way you would treat your romantic relationships.
This might sounds ridiculous, but hear me out.
How Most People Treat Jobs
Your job is something you spend most of your waking hours doing, and by statistical estimates this will continue to be the case until about age 65. For some people, work is a chore, something they regret having to do, and would love to stop doing. Something they celebrate every time they do not have to do, like the weekend or vacations. For others, it’s nothing more than a money source, a challenge to see how they can squeeze the most money out of their work. These kinds of people tend to work super hard, usually many more hours a week than most, as more time working equals more money.
In my experience, people that think of jobs this way are consistently unhappy, as they spend most of their waking hours for most of their lives doing something that they don’t particularly enjoy but rather do out of apparent necessity. They cloak their unhappiness in culture and/or money. “Everyone else is doing this”, they think, “so it must be normal.” And/or they spend the money they earn — their reward — on things to make them feel better than they feel slogging away their days at work. New clothes, new cars, luxury vacations, nights out at the bar or club.
There is another type of job-haver though. Someone who works out of instinct. They work because it’s on something they want to do. Something they feel like they have to do. Something they would probably do anyway, even if they were not employed or paid, in their free time. For these types of people, work is natural. It’s often exciting. It’s certainly not something they regret or look forward to ending eventually. It’s not even “work” by traditional definitions. In my humble opinion, this is the type of person you want to be.
My Journey to Finding Purpose
By nothing less than pure luck, this is the kind of person I ended up as. My story is far from straightforward. I went to college with a jazz music scholarship. I DJ’d professionally during school, ran a charity organization, and made small websites as a freelancer. I graduated with a neuroscience degree. I applied for jobs in graphic design, then got my first job as a programmer. This year I’m traveling around the world, and right now I’m doing photography full time for a nonprofit.
This might sound absurd, and I only leave it here to show that there is no standard path to where I ended up. Finding my job as a programmer is the most relevant to this piece, so I’ll break that down. I was always interested in how people work, which is why I studied neuroscience in college. I don’t regret it, I learned some important things, but when it as I got closer to graduation I realized that I just didn’t get that much out of studying neuroscience. I certainly was not going to learn how people work. In fact, nobody knows how people work, and neuroscientists have only been able to make crude attempts at figuring out small pieces of it. The best I could do with my neuroscience degree would be to become a doctor or toil away in a lab in order to find some tiny piece of a tiny piece of something that might one day after I die contribute a small amount to someone else figuring out how people work. And neither of these options excited me much.
Meanwhile, I had been quietly working another job during school. I had been doing freelance graphic design and building websites for small businesses by hand. I did this in my free time not for the money (I was very fortunate to have my parents cover the cost of college for me), but because I enjoyed it. I liked making formerly ugly things look beautiful and presentable. And I liked building little tiny sites that looked nice and that people appreciated. I liked the process of making things, then putting them out to the public. So I made simple websites and graphics. When it came time for me to decide what type of jobs to apply for, it wasn’t too tough of a decision for me. I would make websites and graphics for free, honestly — I just liked doing it, learning, and improving. If someone would pay me to do this, I thought, that sounded like the real deal. So I started applying for jobs in technology.
There was another challenge here though. I had never taken a single course in graphics or programming. Wait, actually I did take one course in programming. I took it in while studying abroad, it was taught in Spanish. I got an “F”.
So here I would be, approaching potential employers with zero academic experience, no internship experience, and seeing if they would give me a full time job. I only had a few things going for me: the little work I had done, my love for the work, and a promise that I will learn like crazy if hired. It was an exercise in persuasion, convincing a company that they wouldn’t regret letting me in, giving me a try. Not altogether different from the beginning of a relationship, really.
But before we push forward with this story, let’s jump back in time for a minute.
Back to the Roots
You may be wondering how exactly I got to the point where I was doing freelance graphic design and building websites. This is not a skill that you acquire overnight, exactly. To discover this, we need to jump back to a time where I was an even more awkward nerd than I am today (and that’s saying a lot). All the way back to middle school.
The curtain opens. The dim glow of a computer illuminates the silhouette of a black office chair. A tiny digital clock on the desk emits a hazy red glow. It reads “1:00am”. The camera zooms closer. Furious clicking and typing can now be heard. Yes indeed, that’s our main character, middle school Jeff, and he’s playing a computer game. At this point, they didn’t have animated moving characters, so it was just text, on a website. The battles were pokémon-like, consisting of simply text and numbers revealing health and damage, who won and lost.
This game was an early free-to-play MMORPG. Even if you know little about gaming today, you may have heard of “World of Warcraft", or “WOW”, a modern game that was deemed so addictive it caused thousands of people to lose their jobs and drop out of school because they were addicted and couldn’t stop playing. These games are carefully tailored to be as addictive as possible, and middle school Jeff was caught by this particular one back in the day. Fortunately it wasn’t so well-developed as the most recent ones, as it was an early model, and I did manage to stay in school. But I spent quite a lot of time on it back then, and it was very important to me.
Each player in the game had a profile page, with a profile picture, much like Facebook. The best players had the coolest profile pictures — renders of awesome video game characters in action, fire flying left and right, and the names of their avatars emblazoned over the top. Custom — nothing less. Custom made by a real graphic designer. Eventually, another player taught me how I could attain a copy of photoshop and a couple steps I could take to make a cool-looking profile picture. It was very formulaic, not much creativity involved. But this was the key to more in-game currency. By making these profile pictures for people in photoshop, I could earn virtual gold, and use that to buy cooler and fancier equipment in the game. Score!
As I started a small stash of real-world-earned virtual money, I started tinkering around with other ways to make graphics. I wanted to get better, earn more. I started looking up tutorials, trying to find good resources, asking other designers, copying cool profile photos. Over time, I came to understand how photoshop worked pretty well.
Even long after I stopped playing the game, I held on to my photoshop chops, and occasionally put them to use to design a poster, a card. Over time, I saw more and more uses for design. I used it to make posters and tee shirts for a charity club I was involved with. I used to to campaign for student government. I used it to make logos for bands. People started to pay me little bits of money for design. Eventually, in college, someone asked me to make them a website. I said “sure”. I didn’t know how to make a website, but I knew I could make something that looked pretty. I managed to cobble together something simple out of a bunch of googling. It hardly worked, but looked really nice. The client loved it, and referred me to a friend. So it began.
Years later, after graduating college, I had built a portfolio of my work and a custom website as an application to an awesome company. They believed in me and invested in me, thankfully, and since then I have been loving my job every day.
Note: In light of the above, for all parents that think video games are rotting your kids’ brains, it’s not so black and white ; )
Shopping for Jobs
I talk to a lot of people about working in tech. It’s a “hot” field right now, and it draws a lot of interest. Most people think of jobs as something you shop for, pausing at shop windows to look at the price tag, the hours, the benefits. And web development jobs right now are the shiniest new toy in every store’s window.
When I was thinking about what jobs to apply for more than 5 years ago, I didn’t consider any of this at all. I didn’t know if I could get a high-paying job making websites. I thought probably not, honestly. It didn’t seem like the most glamorous job, really. When most people thought of programming, they thought of nerds sitting in front of computers all day in cubicles, slogging away at computers under fluorescent lights, their social skills withering away. Mind numbing work for pale-skinned nerds. But none of this made any difference to me because I liked doing this stuff. I did it in my free time — nobody asked me to, and I had no particular reason to. I was not thinking about jobs, money, or status. I just liked doing it. And I still do. A lot has changed since then in the industry for the better. Web dev jobs are now more glamorous than ever, and the industry is starved for talent. But while I am very lucky that it has happened, it has made no difference to why I continue my work, and never made a difference in why I chose it originally.
Both then and now for me, my job was treated as a relationship. A love affair. It didn’t matter how glamorous it was, what mattered was that I loved it. For everyone I speak with, I look for the same thing. If people cite reasons like good pay, job security, that it seems “exciting”, etc. I know that they are window shopping. And if they are asking my advice, I do not think window shopping is the way to find a job that will truly make you happy. Looking for love will.
Now, it doesn’t mean that window shopping is a bad thing to do, briefly, at first. Every relationship begins with a glance. Something shallow, physical. Even after this, it’s encouraged by subtle features and price tags. Emotional baggage. Personality. Skills. Affluence. But for a true loving relationship, it’s not the price tags that make the final call. Its not entirely cold or logical like the way we can calculate the value of a new coat or car. It’s something a little warmer, pinker, more squishy. Something you can’t entirely explain with concrete reasons, although you can superficially cite some of those price tags since it would be awkward if you didn’t answer at all. You don’t just date someone because they are good-looking. At least I hope not.
Looking for Love
Maybe you never have done this before. But try it. Treat your job like a relationship. It’s something you spend a lot of time with, and makes a huge impact on your life. Are you happy with it? If you wouldn’t date or marry someone because they are rich or exotic, don’t take a job because it pays well or seems exciting. Find a job that you truly love. A job you are happy with, comfortable with, could see yourself settling down with.
I say this as if it’s simple, but it’s far from it. Some people marry their first love, but this is unusual. Many of us go through a few relationships, some an extraordinary number, before finding one that’s right. The process can be incredibly frustrating, very time-consuming. There are highs and lows. Pain and bliss. Some people never find one that’s right, giving up and settling for something less than ideal. We learn as much about ourselves as we do about other people in the pursuit of a life partner. Jobs are just the same way. Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t settle for something less than you deserve. Take the time, and be careful, and make your final decision not on something superficial, but on love.
People often consider changing careers. But in all likelihood if you are considering changing jobs, it’s nothing more than a flirtation at that stage. It looks fancy, it’s something different, it has the money, the looks, and the lifestyle — at least you think so. Just be careful not to commit too much before exploring further, as you would in any other relationship.
The only career I know in detail is web development, since it’s the only one I’ve had. So I’ll continue this article with part two, where we explore careers in web development further. Maybe others will contribute other posts exploring other career paths — I hope so! But in the mean time, come along.
Photo is of my girlfriend and me in Byblos, Lebanon. We got very lucky to catch an absolutely beautiful sunset and took a million photos while we were there.
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