90,000 Hours: A Manifesto

Nod along silently if you’ve ever experienced any of the following:

• You’ve wondered “what the hell am I doing with my life?”
• You feel as though you haven’t found that it that you’re supposed to be.
• You feel stagnant in your career — you lack engagement and learning and growth and feel — just drained by the end of the day
• You feel like you have untapped potential — that there’s more that you could be doing in your job and your career and your life, but you’re just not doing it yet.

The average person spends 90,000 hours of their lives working. That’s ⅓ of our entire lives.

And there are these societally accepted norms around work that I just find — mind boggling and outdated.

When we spend literally the majority of our waking hours working, why is it socially accepted that we’re supposed to be miserable? That it’s just a job? That we just clock in and clock out, and get our paycheck so that we can really live our lives in the leftover hours?

Why are we boxed in to roles, told to specialize, discouraged from trying entirely new things, afraid of being beginners in one thing once we’re already experts in something else?

Why are we told to find a “real job” or that we’re being unrealistic when we search for a career with purpose?

A study polled 20,000 professionals and asked them to rank the factors that motivated them to do their best work. Among the top 10 were:

• Challenge and responsibility
• Flexibility
• Professional development
• Stimulating colleagues and bosses
• Exciting job content

This shows just how much we value learning and growth and engagement in our work.

And yet — why are these factors the holy grail? Things we all want and need in our work, but are seemingly just for the lucky ones and for the rest of us are scarce or non-existent? When these things are so important — why is this not the baseline?

That said….

I propose we:

• Challenge our societally accepted notions around work.
• Shift these perceptions by not settling. By understanding that humans aren’t cogs with singular abilities but humans with almost limitless potential to learn, grow, change, and adapt.
• Push back on these outdated mentalities around work by truly seeking engagement, learning, and growth in our jobs and not settling for anything less.
• Approach careers that serve others with a sense of purpose not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

We justify and rationalize lack of engagement in our jobs by saying ‘well, they pay us for our work,’ when really we’re paying them in our most valuable resource — — our time.

Isn’t it time we shift these views? Isn’t it time we take our time back and use it to learn and grow and serve others with purpose instead of accepting work as a necessary evil to fund our lives?

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes that always gives me pause:

“We all have 2 lives. And the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

Let’s change these mentalities together. Are you ready?