When to leave a job because it's wrong for you
And when not to
My last email was about how to get through the winter, for those who, like me, find it a struggle. With cold rain pouring down outside, I’ve just begun a writing sabbatical: my aim over these coming wintery months is to turn the first draft of the Great Work book into a second draft, something I wouldn’t be mortified to show to editors and agents. It’s begun well, with the mercy-killing of an introduction I loved, but that needed to be about 20% of its original length. And now it is. There’s blood and elegant verbiage all over the floor.
When to leave because a job’s bad, and when not to
There’s a comic by internet cartoonist Zach Weinersmith that says: one day you’ll be dead—but you don’t live only once. It takes about seven years to master something. So, says the comic, if you live to be 88 that gives you eleven opportunities from the age of eleven to become great at something. “Most people never let themselves die,” writes Weinersmith. You could do all sorts of things. “These are your lifetimes. USE THEM.”
I keep coming back to this comic. I spent the early part of my career secretly embarrassed about my apparent inability to stay in one job for more than a few years. There’s the romantic ideal of the GP who, upon completion of his training (it’s a male stereotype), finds a community to commit to, settles down, sees patients whom he immunized as babies through to their middle age, and works in one place for forty years before retiring to a lionizing article in the local newspaper and an abundance of ugly tea-cosies knitted by grateful patients.
Me, I seem to need new challenges once I’ve figured out how to do something and made a difference. I’ve been a GP more than anything else. But I’ve done that seriously in seven communities across two continents. And, at various times, I’ve also dabbled in being a barrister (a litigation lawyer—I did stick with that one for ten years), a local government politician, an international development worker, an academic, and a hospital medical director.
For a while, I had a sneaking suspicion that my habit of switching jobs every few years reflected a flaw in my personality. But the ‘eleven lives’ cartoon was part of my realization that, while the ugly tea-cosies model is right for some, it isn’t for everyone. It’s fine to craft your life from a series of adventures. For some, it’s right. Looking back, my eccentric work history makes some sense, one thing leading to another, growing my ability to help people experiencing the rough end of injustices.
But, looking back, I think there may have been, early on, a job switch that did reflect a flaw in my personality. And there’s a lesson in this.
Wrong reasons for moving job
There was another job I left, early in my career, blaming the job. I didn’t make that decision well. I wasn’t Great Work about it. It was a tough gig, and the large organization for which I was working wasn’t well run. I told myself that’s why it wasn’t the right job for me. But that wasn’t true. I was struggling because I was early in my career and hadn’t yet worked out how to look after myself while managing a high-risk, high-pressure workload, nor how to work in a dysfunctional organization (to some extent, all are), nor how to look after relationships with colleagues who were often battling the same challenges themselves. Those are things I could have started to learn then, and my life would have been better if I had.
So those struggles recurred until I figured out some of the Great Work principles. Had I then understood that often, it’s the reaction, not the stuff; or appreciated the importance of knowing thy working self, or recognized my Catcher in the Rye syndrome, or grasped quite how important are working relationships, or even just read about more sophisticated ways of getting through a tough week, I’d have been better at that job, happier too, and perhaps I’d have stayed there for longer. (I guess I have learned a lot since!) And, had I still decided to move on, I’d have made that decision more wisely. Either way, the next few years would have been better for me.
You can move to a new job because you’re excited about a new opportunity, or you can do it because there’s something wrong with your current work. Ask yourself, if you’re thinking of moving on: does the idea contain genuine sadness? If not, it’s a clue you may be leaving because you’re fed up with where you are.
A question to ask yourself
And if you’re leaving because there’s something wrong with the current job, there’s a vital but easily-avoided question to ask yourself. Is what’s wrong with this job really something about me?
This question is critical to happiness and success in your working life because when you move to another job you’re going to take yourself with you. And the risk is that you’ll continue to find fault with each job and never settle into something fulfilling.
There’s no shame if your struggle with a job is partly to do with you. It almost always is: we all have our strengths and weaknesses. And, if it is, it doesn’t always follow that you should stay in the job. I’ve just left a job I loved because it involved regularly working in the middle of the night. Now in my mid-fifties, that was starting to kill me, and I realized, belatedly, that I’d reached the point at which I had to, and I mean really had to, stop working nights. I can stop, just not in that job. But I went through that thought-process consciously, checking and double-checking that it wasn’t just that I was tired and needed a break (doable), or that something had pissed me off (surmountable).
There are, of course, other considerations. Do you realistically have the option of moving somewhere else? If you do, would somewhere else truly be better? What’s the current labor market like, doing what you do in places where you’d want to do it? Are you thinking about this because a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has arisen somewhere else? How would the move you’re contemplating affect any career goals you may have?
But the biggest mistake I’ve seen people make, and a mistake I made early in my career, is to jump before asking yourself, “What’s my part in what’s wrong with my current job, and what could I do about that?” Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Sometimes it’s better to learn how to have a good picnic on brown grass.
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