Are you waking up excited to go to work?Maybe! Or maybe not?? Are you honest with yourself every morning when you convince yourself this is where you want to go and what you want to do?
Am I Doing What I Want?
A full-time worker will spend roughly 80,000 hours at work over the course of their working life. If you’re in the wrong career, that could mean tens of thousands of hours spent devoted to something you don’t even really care about.
“It isn’t just a matter of making it through another week or another month,” Mr. Markman said.“Those months become years. And when you recognize it at that level of magnitude, sometimes that can give you enough force to be willing to make a hard decision.”
We all have a set of core values that define us. Whether your priority is an achievement, helping others, doing good, having a structure in your life, or just plain happiness, you want to achieve high levels of self-awareness to have better relationships, and as a result, perform better at work. One good way to identify your values is to stop asking “why” questions about yourself and start asking “what” questions. A better approach would be to ask yourself, “What are the situations that make me feel terrible, and what do they have in common?”
What Do You Do?
Our work identities are entwined with our personal identities so much that we sometimes fail to differentiate between the two. Mr. Markman suggests looking at job titles a different way: as verbs rather than nouns.
“When you go to a party, one of the first things you ask someone is, ‘What do you do?’ because of that belief that it tells us something deep about who they are,” he said. “One of the things we have to do is to really try to treat our career more like a verb than a noun. There’s a lot of research on nouns that shows that as soon as you give a label to something, you come to believe that somebody or some object has essence of that thing. A cat — why is a cat a cat? It has essence of a cat. That’s true not just for biological categories, it’s true even for professions.”
Rather than focusing on a job title as a defining characteristic, according to Mr. Markman, we should instead think of a job title as one component of a complex person who has other skills, passions, challenges, etc. Stop and think about it. Right now.
But What About Money?
Unfortunately, no one can answer that. Family, age, debt, plans, retirement goals, and many other factors come into play. Money diminishes happiness once a salary reaches about $75,000.
But are you ready to spend your life doing something that makes you genuinely miserable? “Doing something you feel is satisfying can actually increase that level of happiness in ways that no amount of money will,” Mr. Markman said.
