My struggles at work are well-documented on the site, as is my desire to eventually leave my day job and concentrate fully on Know The Ledge. Recently I’ve been trying to analyze my stress on a deeper level to get a better understanding of what makes me tick and what I could do to hopefully alleviate it. No matter if we know the root cause of our stress, we still need to find a way to deal with it if we’re not able to just get rid of the cause all together.
One of the things I’ve been struggling with the most as I’ve analyzed my whole career is that I seem to only stay at jobs for a maximum of a year and a half to two years before I move on to something else. For years I just thought that it was because I hadn’t found that great company and/or position where I felt I was paid what I was worth. So in my mind, I always justified my continuous job movement due to natural progression in my career and going for what I wanted. Finally that I had reached a great company with great pay and benefits, I thought it would be different. It has been to a certain extent, and I have stayed there longer than any other job I’ve ever had in my life, but with all the things going on recently I feel a big change coming on.
Lately, I’ve started to think that my constant moving from job to job has more to do with my own wants and needs than simple job progression. I have always felt frustration with decisions that management in my companies have made over the years, and even more frustration at the fact that I couldn’t really do anything about it. While I don’t necessarily lust for total control, I at least want to have a say. The red tape and bureaucracy that comes with corporate America can really bring you down. Maybe I’m just not cut out to be a corporate guy. I always felt that I could adapt to any situation for the money, and just do the things I wanted to in my spare time. The problem that I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older is that I don’t have that free time anymore. Once you get a wife and children, you don’t have time to do whatever you want anymore. That’s a positive thing, but it puts more of an emphasis on enjoying your work. For me, the lack of control in my day to day work is a cause of stress.
While gaining more control in decision making is a sign that I need to be an entrepreneur, another trend that I’ve noticed is that I just don’t have the passion and drive for my day to day job after a certain point. Sure once I start a new job I’m determined to do well and prove myself, but once that initial time period wears off I don’t have the lasting passion for what I’m doing. To me that says that I’m not doing something that I want to do. I do it (and do it well) for the constant paycheck and basic need to feed my family, but the actual interest in my work is lacking and it takes it’s toll on me. The fact that I’m leaving jobs every one to two years just shows me that I’m only able to do something that I don’t want for a finite period of time (obviously about one to two years), and after that period of time my mind and body creates enough frustration until I ultimately move on to the next opportunity.
While I try really hard to have a better attitude about things, any gains are temporary. In the end I know that on a daily basis I’m not working on what I was put here to work on, and that just kills me. The older I get the less patient I become, and my attitude toward my current work situation has deteriorated fast. It can be hard to deal with sometimes, as you never want to leave a bad impression with anyone, and my current employer is really a great employer all around. I’ve always said that if I ever wanted to work for a company, it would be the company I’m working for. But the problem is that I don’t want to work for a company, I want to work for myself. When I look at all the stress in my life, I would say that 90% of it comes from my desire to work for myself and not being able to. That’s a pretty hefty chunk, and the ultimate proof that I was born to be an entrepreneur.
