The Path to Career Happiness Begins with a Job that Sucks

When you graduate from school you should try very hard to get a job that you love. But the likelihood of actually getting that job is very low, between the limited experience that everyone has fresh out of school to the few options in the marketplace to the narrow ideas that you have about what your options are.

So here’s another tactic: Find a job you hate.

Hate is an excellent motivator. Love may make the world go around, but hate is what’s grinding the gears. Hate can give you the energy and the drive to figure out how to get what you really want instead.

You might land a job that’s just okay. It’s not great, but it’s not horrible. So you will probably be able to stomach it for a while. You may think you want to do something different, but your mediocre job is fine for now. As you continue to work at this job that isn’t wonderful, you’ll get proficient at it, and then you’ll get better at it, and you may eventually get promoted. And you’ll make a little more money. And then you’ll probably spend more money. And you may still think you want to do something different, but in the meantime there’s bonus season coming up, and maybe another promotion in the winds, and you have a new mortgage and your 8th kid and 3rd alimony on the way, and so you’ll just keep that job for now.

Eventually, you forget that you wanted to do something different. You do what you do and you can’t imagine doing any different. Or, worse, you can’t imagine someone hiring you do to something different, because this is the thing you’re qualified to do, this thing that doesn’t interest you. It’s what you know. Fear sets in, fear of starting over at a job you don’t know exercising skills you forgot or never developed. So you stick around in job purgatory, year after year. Maybe you’ll eventually get a watch and a retirement party.

On the other hand, you could start your career with a job you detest. You get up every morning dreading getting in to the office, and feel a sense of release at the end of each day. You look forward to Friday afternoons with a pathetic puppy-at-the-door sense of suspense, and get depressed as Monday morning approaches. Again.

This is the perfect situation for you to find career happiness, because whatever it is you want to do, it’s clear that it’s not this. So you think long and hard about what else you want to do. What classes did you enjoy in school? What things do you enjoy doing when you’re not at work? What, specifically, do you want to improve about your current job? Do you need more schooling to get into a career you want? Or do you just need to find a better employer?

There are exactly the questions that you would have a hard time answering when you’re in school, or in a job that’s… okay. But when you actually hate your job, your mind is so much clearer and so much more motivated to ask and then answer these questions.

And then once you’ve figured out what you need to do, go do it. Because we all spend far too much of our lives working in jobs to suffer the punishment of not enjoying the enormous amount of time we spend there.

So go get a job you hate. So that you can find a career you love.