• Home
  • My Favorite Topics
    • Blogging
    • Business
    • Career
    • Cars
    • Consulting
    • Epic Life Quest
    • Iceland
    • Marketing
    • Presenting
    • Productivity
  • My Life Quest
    • Future Achievements
  • About Me
  • My Recent Photos

What Career Success (and Misery) Means to Me

6 years ago
career, happiness
1 Comment

To me, success means:

  • Doing challenging work that I love
  • While surrounded by people I admire
  • Working for a company that I respect
  • Getting a fair trade between the hours I put in, and the reward
  • The ability to make that tradeoff choice myself

Success doesn’t have to mean starting a company or being a freelance consultant, and indeed, for me, starting a company was never something that was important to me. I can achieve those five bullet points – or rather, as many of ’em as possible – regardless of the organizational structure I’m in.

I am successful at Pandemic, but only on the easy levels
I am successful at Pandemic, but only on the easy levels

Flipping that around, misery means:

  • Doing routine work that I hate
  • While surrounded by people I don’t look up to
  • Working for a company doing things that I don’t respect
  • Getting unfairly compensated for the work that I put in
  • Being unable to choose how much work I put in, or the reward for it

It’s rare to see complete success (or complete misery) – most of the time, we’ve got jobs that meet a lot of our definitions of success, but just not all of ’em.

Sadly, the less successful you are in your current job, odds are, the less time you have to go find a better-suited one. Some of my darkest, most miserable times involved putting in 60-70 hours a week trying to hold my job together. It wasn’t that my employer wasn’t thankful – they were usually gracious and encouraging – but I was simply working too hard, doing things I didn’t love, and not able to make the choice about how many hours I wanted to work.

So ironically, when you’re miserable, you may have to work more.

You may have to bite the bullet to spend your own personal after-hours time building an online presence, marketing yourself, networking, and finding a better position.

And even worse, this is the time of your life when you need to be the most upbeat. I’ve interviewed plenty of beat-down, worn-out IT folks whose body language said, “I hate my job, I hate my life right now, and I would take any position to get out of this mess.” While I totally feel for those people, they don’t inspire confidence, and I would worry that their next job would just be a rebound one.

I wish I had some easy, valuable advice that would fix this. I don’t.

But if you find yourself only kinda miserable, the time to work on your next job isn’t later. It’s now, while you still have some spare time in your life, and you’re not completely burned out.

career, happiness
Previous Post
Why My Latest Project Uses NoSQL
Next Post
500-Level Guide to Career Internals: Attendee Questions & Answers

1 Comment. Leave new

  • Pixeldude
    March 26, 2017 4:21 pm

    Thank you for writing this – good grief I needed to hear this wisdom. Especially the last part…you know…the “get ahead of it before you’re completely miserable” part. 😉

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.

Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a Jaguar XKR-S, Porsche 944 Turbo, Porsche 356 Speedster replica, and a Ferrari 328 GTS.

profile for Brent Ozar on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

© 2021 Brent Ozar, all rights reserved. Privacy Policy

  • Home
  • My Favorite Topics
  • My Life Quest
  • About Me
  • My Recent Photos