Quit Your Job
The Reason Why You Should Quit Your Job is simple. Life is short. There’s a video I saw by YouTuber Rob Dial, where he talks about how most people hate their jobs and that you shouldn’t spend your formative years slaving away doing something you hate. While I agree with the statement as a whole or jumping off point, I wanted to dive a bit deeper.
Research shows that most Americans actually like their jobs and current workplace environments. According to a 2016 Pew survey poll, American workers are “generally satisfied with their jobs” That in itself is the problem. Many employers do just enough to satisfy the status quo…they offer benefits and stability - all great things that are nice on the surface but in the grand scheme of your life’s timeline - you’re settling at best. Settling in life is “the risk”. You limit yourself to a life of lesser experience.
The traditional workplace has been built on a lie. It was designed to keep you boxed in. It’s what keeps our capitalistic society ticking. This was a masterful plan to train us from a young age to be molded into ideal citizens serving their role - which made sense when most jobs were for farming and agriculture. The formula is simple. You’re born, you go to school, you study and specialize in a field that may interest you, you graduate with student loan debt, get an entry-level job, try to work up the corporate ladder, and retire with benefits if you’re smart enough to have savings and invest in a 401K. Although disrupters are lauded with praise in Silicon Valley, most people face harsh criticism and get scoffed at when they share a dream they want to go after. What happened–to your dream?
As we progress into the future, technology will rapidly replace many jobs currently occupied by humans. There will be very few types of jobs that cannot be overtaken by AI. Don’t believe me, check out the growth of Chat GPT. It’s an AI platform that is already helping people create intricate essays and scripts with a few simple formatted queries.
The ramifications of this are massive. According to a study by the McKinsey Global Institute, up to 800 million jobs could be automated by 2030. This is all to say that the job you feel okay with is putting you at more risk than ever before and you need to take on work that evokes your passion and taps into your creativity. The sense of security you might feel is more of an illusion than ever before.
It's never too late to make a change and pursue your dream job. Successful people in a variety of fields, such as Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling, all took risks and made career changes later in life. So if you're unhappy in your current job and have always dreamed of doing something else, now may be the perfect time to make a change and pursue your passion.
The way to quit isn’t simple. Though I’m a fan of the book The Four Hour Work Week, written by serial entrepreneur, Tim Ferriss, who entices the audience with the dream of only having to work four hours a week doing what you love, the reality is that you will not be shortcutting your hours, you’ll be putting more. The payoff though will be worth it. To plan this out you will first have to ask yourself what you want to do. Want to be a gamer for a living? Guess what?… you have to put in the hours. Get good. In many aspects good isn’t enough. You have to be so good they can’t ignore you - a quote once said by comedian Steve Martin after he reached a level of fame and success we can all admire. Deliberate practice in the space or an area of expertise that will help you quit your current job. I’ve studied the habits of YouTubers, content creators, and entrepreneurs. While some get lucky and leap into success at a pretty quick rate, the average seems to do it after two years of hard work. The majority take even longer.
The best step is figuring out how much money you need to live comfortably. Belinda Luscombe wrote an article for Time magazine discussing the elements behind happiness and how there’s no discernible increase in happiness after your income exceeds 75k/yr. So it helps to know that number for you. Then you can start reverse engineering the dream job. Find someone you know doing what you want to be doing and see the steps they took to get there. If you can get in touch with them even better.
There are traps that people fall into Debt, Other people's advice or feelings, shame from time spent in college… you have to get over those obstacles.
You can’t outright quit your job - unless you have savings… I mean lots of savings and can live on them for at least the number of months it takes that can cover your bills including rent, utilities, food, and other recurring expenses. This way you don’t have to feel rushed or desperate. You have to do market research on the types of jobs you are interested in and willing to do, especially if you want to be self-employed.
There’s a shift in the habits and routines that your day-to-day will have to see if you are going actually to be able to succeed at this change. You have to ask yourself if you are indeed self-motivated, can you wake up without a boss holding you accountable?
Some people can succeed in playing the long game in their company and move up the ranks to become top executives. Look at Steve Balmer of Mircosoft, he was employee number 30 and eventually became CEO and is worth 20+ Billion dollars. A few years ago, he even bought the Clippers for around 2 Billion dollars.
If you are happy at your job and are okay living as you are then congratulations, you’ve already won! But if you’re looking to upgrade, enhance your life, or do something that makes you not live for the weekends then I challenge you to quit your job and follow the steps I’m about to outline for you. Don’t be naive, don’t abandon a good situation. Plan carefully, make the right moves, and two years from now you’ll wake up wondering why you didn’t quit your job sooner.
The four action steps you can take to move toward your goal and land that dream job are simple yet powerful:
1. Routines: Workout or Walk - this helps with creative thinking
1. The more predictable your day-to-day life becomes the more freedom you’ll have in other areas of your life. You’ll be able to tap into creativity in ways you never thought possible and you’ll also have the mental bandwidth to act on it. Tidying up your space, and limiting the number of decisions you have to make for your wardrobe and daily meals are great examples.
2. Networking and/or asking for help
1. Connect with people in person if you can
2. Start networking and reaching out to people in your desired field. Attend industry events, join professional organizations, and connect with people on LinkedIn. Building relationships and getting your name out there can open up opportunities that you might not have otherwise known about. This can be done online, but you’ll have less competition if you go out of your way to build more connections. People are getting lazier and the more effort something takes, the more rewarding it can be.
3. Wake up earlier or stay up later - I did a video on how waking up at 5 a.m. every day changed my life but in this case, either approach can work.
1. Sacrifice that bit of Netflix, Hulu, or HBO Max
2. It’s only considered a sacrifice to your current self because you’re missing out on an instant form of gratification - which for many people helps them forget their mundane or stressful existence. Your future self is screaming at you saying “Just do what it takes! You’ll have more time for Netflix later!”
4. Read something in your specific field; magazines, books, a popular blog
1. Avoid video, and give your eyes a rest
2. I’m convinced that reading activates the part of the imagination in ways that the medium of video doesn’t. Video is like our planet, it’s vast yet defined by structures and it’s limited. Reading is like the universe - ever expanding to infinity. You also have less of a tendency of falling for clickbait or going into rabbit holes of research on a random topic. These platforms are designed to colonize your attention. Read if you can, but if video is just your thing and helps you learn - then outsmart yourself by limiting access to websites you know will pull you away from the goal.
Most of these recommendations are off-line action steps because many of you will be able to do it online pretty quickly and painlessly but getting out of your comfort zone and connecting with people in the real world will for one make you more memorable, giving you an edge over your digital counterparts and two, it will help you break free from the distractions of our monitors and from the dopamine drips of social media dings and DMs.
As an actor living in LA, I had to be able to bounce from one job to another so as to stay flexible for auditions. Pre-Covid, driving hours to and from auditions was the norm and if you didn’t make an audition, your agent or manager would scold you if not drop you, or the casting offices bringing you in wouldn’t do so anymore. So in order to preserve my ability to audition, I worked a lot of jobs. This bouncing around led me to meet many people from many different backgrounds and I started to study and better understand the dynamics of people at work. The formula for succeeding at this pursuit boils down to what you do when you’re not at work which can lead you to a better life of doing what you truly love. Jim Carrey once said in a commencement speech that a lesson he learned from his “play it safe” father “You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well fail at doing what you love.”