The urge to quit an unsatisfying job to embark on a career that you always dreamt of is quite the feeling. Even thinking about it excites us.
Taking that leap is intimidating enough in itself, but the step that comes next is even more so. Why? Let’s say you started a whole new career or a side hustle.
The first few days—or even the first few months—must be all the more exciting. You’re still on a high. You’re proud that you finally made the call.
But, this honeymoon phase will come to an end eventually. And then, real life hits.
At this point, you’ve probably taken a step back. You’re new to what you’re doing, so there will be a long, dry period where you’ll have to hone some new skills. You’re pretty thrilled about the outcome, yes, but the amount of work you’ll have to put in to get there is starting to feel overwhelming.
You had a good income, benefits, a safety net, and now you’re stuck on a career path with no guarantee of success. It is at this point that you’ll question yourself: “What the hell did I do? Is this even worth it?”
Even worse, even when you’ve made it pretty far in this journey, things aren’t going to be all sunshine and rainbows. As the novelist Frank Norris1 put it:
“I don’t like to write, I like having written.”
Any meaningful pursuit is a mix of pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
I remember the time that I left my engineering job and moved to a new country for graduate studies. I was excited.
But a month into the program, I realized that I had to teach undergraduate students as part of my work as a research assistant. I loved to teach, but didn’t want anything to do with marking reports.
I hated it.
It took hours: hours that I could have spent on my own research. I’d delay it until the very last moment. And then, when I had no choice but to go through about 50 reports every single week, I’d drag myself through them, one by one, taking breaks between each and every one.
And I’ll tell ya…that wasn’t a pleasant experience at all.
But my bitterness towards this process came to an end after talking to a senior student.
“It’s a part of the job,” he said. “There’s no way you can just duck out of marking reports and have fun running experiments in the lab all day.”
The fun, I understood, comes with a cost.
Everything is a struggle. You just have to choose a struggle you resist the least. And find ways to enjoy it anyway.
If your dream career is to become a writer, you’ll inevitably have days when you stress over a first draft. If your dream career is to become a painter, you might spend days agonising over a single brushstroke.
These struggles aren’t going to go away. They’re part of the job.
This is also why passion alone isn’t enough to sustain a pursuit like this. Because passion doesn’t necessarily promise you a clear-cut goal.
So when reality hits, the expectations you built around passion begin to seem unrealistic. The longer you measure your progress against those expectations, the more likely your dream job is to stay just that: a dream.
But I don’t say this to push you towards the whole “no pain, no gain” school of thought. Instead, I think we should find ways to enjoy even the less appealing bits, or at least not actively dislike them.
But how? How do you enjoy something you already know you’re not going to enjoy?
It’s like trying to convince yourself that a bitter pill is sweet. Not that effective. Is it?
Ask a parent with a toddler, though, and they might have something different to add. Because they have had a trick up their sleeves for generations to get fussy kids to swallow bitter pills like they love it.
“If you swallow this,” they say, “I’ll give you something that you really like.”
And we all fell for it.
I should know because, as a former child, I, too, was a victim!
Whenever I had to swallow a pill—or, by God, sit still for an injection—I’d do anything to get out of it. So my parents would promise me chocolate cake afterwards.
And it worked. Every single time. They kept their promise too.
So I trained my mind to get through these unpleasant bits because I had something to look forward to.
Plodding through a dry phase in an otherwise thrilling career would pretty much work the same way. We know what we’re working towards. And how happy it will make us when we get there.
The hope of getting there, then, is our chocolate cake.
True, we still might not enjoy it, but at the very least we get to convince ourselves that it’s a necessary evil.
It’s a “part of the job”.
- Frank Norris, quoted in “The Writing Grind,” The Bellman, 4 December 1915, p. 643. ↩︎