Step One of Building Your Successful Online 'Thing': Find a 9-to-5 You Love
Here's how...
Hey Part-Time Creator,
This is the last newsletter until it goes paid on the 26th January. This week I’m talking about a different way to work, some unconventional thoughts on building a career and a business you love. Let’s dive in.
Read time: 5.3 minutes
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How to find the work you love…
I’ll admit, in my 20s, I was a bit of an idiot when it came to work. I thought the most important things were being in senior meetings, earning loads, and inflating my ego by looking good on LinkedIn.
When that bubble burst I was left with a disaster of a life, completely clueless about my career/future and I was beyond miserable — I needed to figure out how to get back on track, quickly. Practically all of my 20s were spent doing this.
Work and your career can get complicated pretty quickly. It’s always been a huge topic of conversation in my head. And important right? We spend a huge amount of time at work, it must provide us with the things we need. But that’s easier said than done. What you want to do in your 20s might not be the things you want in your 30s. And then what?
It’s not impossible to find work you love — it’s just *very* hard. And by ‘love’ I don’t mean bouncing to work, smiling from ear to ear every day. You can love a job and find it frustrating or mind-numbing some days. This is how to realistically find work that you love (mostly).
Get to know yourself (which sounds *really* easy): spoiler, it’s not.
If you want to make a dent in your work happiness, self-awareness is queen. On the surface, that sounds like an easy exploration — sit in a room for ten minutes ask yourself some nice questions, and let the light flow from you.
But in actual fact, it’s much harder than that — like x10 harder than you can imagine, and like any good house renovation, it’ll take 3x as long. The reality is, it’s sitting with yourself, over and over, asking questions and often not knowing the answers. Worse, it’s thinking you know yourself only to find out weeks later, that it’s not the case at all, you didn’t want that thing you thought you did and now you’re back to square one (so you tell yourself).
It’s frustrating, painful and demoralizing. If you don’t know yourself, then who does? And if you can’t understand who you are, how can you go about building your life in a way that helps you? It’s a wild ol’ ride on the emotions let me tell you.
It’s begrudgingly accepting the irrational parts of you. You know, the parts that you often feel like you can’t control. The parts that take the easy path when you said you wanted the hard parts. The self you told you’d definitely get up at 5 am for, and then when it rocks round to 5 am, you snooze the alarm (aka me this morning). It’s the parts of yourself you’re not happy with, the parts you shy away from. It’s about knowing yourself, predicting based on what you know about yourself, and applying that to your life. My word is it hard work, but it’s the best kind of work, the most rewarding because it leads to great things.
For me, getting to know myself in a work sense came from doing a handful of things.
My five steps:
Step 1: Identify your needs
Step 2: Figure out your wants
Step 3: But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows
Step 4: Understanding different perspectives
Step 5: Adjusting your life for your ‘I have to do this’
Here’s how I’d go about tackling each one.
Step 1: Identify your needs
The first qualifying criteria worth thinking about is your needs. Depending on where you are and what you are doing in your life, you’ll need a number to keep you afloat. Usually, that number is a lot lower than you think but it’s a number that exists none-the-less. It’s important to factor that into career conversations — how you live, and the life you build will play a part in your happiness.
“A single person needs to earn £29,500 a year to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living in 2023. A couple with two children need to earn £50,000 between them.” — JRF
Life often gets expensive quickly and your job’s functionality (at a basic level) is to cover the cost of your life and so, you need to work out your number. A general good rule of thumb is the 50–30–20 rule, but I would flip the ‘savings’ and ‘wants’ categories so it would look like this:
50% income — needs (food, bills, housing, transport)
30% income — savings
20% income — wants (discretionary spending, eating out, etc)
I’d work backward from there. Ask yourself how much you need for each of those categories and you should come up with a number. Then the temptation is to let it creep — don’t let it creep. Don’t fall into the trap of increasing your lifestyle because you can, figure out what you need to live well and live within that.
Step 2: Figure out your wants
When I first entered the world of work, after a few months of being brought squarely back down to Earth, I realized that I’d got this whole job thing wrong. You see, I never thought about what I was doing on a day-to-day basis, instead, I was more bothered about how it all looked on paper. On LinkedIn, it looked like I’d hit the jackpot. Here I was, fresh out of university, great job, and great career prospects, it was all going really well.
In reality, I was more confused than I’d ever been. I was miserable beyond belief. I was so sad that this was my life and I’d ended up here. I had no idea who I was and what I wanted to be. I would walk around and say things like ‘I just want to add value’ or ‘I want to feel like I’ve got a purpose’. Of course, that was vague and could be applied to any situation so never really helped me get anywhere.
It stayed like this for a few miserable years in my early twenties until I started taking an active role in what I wanted out of life and made a conscious decision on who I wanted to be. It took years of back and forth, experimenting, and trying different jobs until I found the one that fit but truly, it was the thing that saved my career.
Here’s what I did to get my career in order:
a) Make your non-specifics, specific
‘I want to be part of something big’ is okay to start with but what does that mean? Unpack it a little, by big do you mean big financial windfall, a high-impact company that tries to do good in the world? Big as in sizeable like a big group of people?
It’s easy to be non-descriptive and vague, it’s harder to sit with these ideas you have and really unpack them. To face the fact that you might not know what you mean by big, you just mean, ‘big’, you know?
But the reality is, that many things can feel big depending on what value you assign to them and things aren’t always immediately obvious that they will have a big impact until you are in it, doing it. And sometimes the ‘big’ comes from you — And if that’s the case, you are everywhere you go, so ‘being part of something big’ isn’t overly helpful.
Try and make the non-specifics, specific. For example, ‘I want to be part of something big’:
What kind of positive impact do you want to create:
Improving people’s lives directly (e.g. healthcare, education)
Supporting systemic change (e.g. policy-making, sustainability)
Helping others to succeed (e.g. coaching, mentoring)
Try and lock down what you mean by these terms and go from there.
b) What do you want your life to look like?
For a long time, I thought about work in three ways: money, career progression, prestige of the company. Later, I realized that those were a poor way to understand what I wanted from life. I can’t remember quite how it happened, it was around the time I decided to delete Instagram because it added no value to my life and fooled me into thinking everyone was doing x10000 better than me.
Instead, I started to think about how I wanted my life to look. I started to think about an ordinary Tuesday in my life and what I wanted it to look like, and that started to shift things, I started asking questions like:
Do I want to walk my dogs at lunchtime?
Did I want to commute for an hour each way?
Did I want to work for profit or for something else?
Did I want to manage people (even though I know it stressed me out last time)?
Five years ago, I thought I needed to climb the corporate ladder, but I never questioned anything else. So I made sure I was taking the necessary steps to get the promotion — after my graduate scheme, I took a job managing people. Long story short, I wasn’t very good at it and I really didn’t like it. I spent 10 months in that job until I finally decided it wasn’t the life for me. I would have never made that move if I’d thought about my day-to-day rather than what my CV looked like. On paper, managing was the best thing for me CV, in reality, I hated it.
c) When do you lose yourself?
Life won’t always be about bliss. It won’t be seamless and romantic like the movies but you will, if you're lucky, have pockets of your day that you really enjoy. That gives you purpose and energy. Ask yourself, when do you feel like that, when do you totally lose yourself in the work because it’s those are the moments you want to optimize for. If you love the game, practice will be easy and that’s the place you want to get to.
You want to find the place that exists when you truly lose yourself. When the chatter in your mind silences, when your insecurities fade, when you are just almost not thinking, you are so consumed by the doing, that the thinking goes out the window. That’s the magic and that’s the place you want to find, and if you, can, call it home.
One way to do that is to explore your point of view. To navigate what you know of the world and the bits that stand out to you. That doesn’t have to be a topic, like ‘marine biology’ or ‘art’, it can be actions and ideas like ‘getting stuff done’ and ‘working with people’.
I’ve largely based my career around the jobs that allow me to get the most stuff done because that’s what I like to do. That’s when I feel most at home and happiest when I’m doing stuff, making decisions, ticking things off my list, and sorting stuff out.
Step 3: But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows
There are these ideas of grandeur, these lines that make us feel like life and work should be perfect. That you should only feel good things and you should love, truly love what you do.
But that is likened to falling in love. When you start you don’t love the person in front of you, you might think they are interesting, attractive, and all the rest of it, but you haven’t been through anything to love them… yet. And that’s sort of how I think about work. You won’t love it straight the way. You won’t love it until you’ve endured something when you’ve had hard days when you’ve had your head in your hands wondering.
You don’t love something straight the way, don’t let life fool you into thinking you will. So when you start off, especially if you’re in your twenties, confused about life and what you’re doing, remember there is a very big difference between being lost and finding your way. It takes time, give it time.
Step 4: Understanding what’s really important
There’s a very common narrative about the very rich. The people who focus solely on money forget that life is to be lived while we’re here. Money solves money problems but how many of them do you actually have? Once they’re gone, you’re left with the life problems.
And those are solved with time, experience, and communication. If you’re so busy focusing on the money all the time, you miss the moments that you were earning all that money for.
It’s a very important lens to apply and to apply often to this career problem. When all is said and done, when you look back at your life, are you going to wish you worked more and earned more? Or are you going to wish you spent more time with your parents, were more present as a parent, sister, brother, etc.
It’s a balancing act and not one any of us gets right all the time but it’s an important view, the question is, what are you doing all this for? And don’t forget the life stuff — your family, friends, experiences, walking your dogs, all that stuff, that’s the real stuff. Money is good, it has a well-earned, important place in all of our lives but it’s not the only thing in it.
Don’t lose sight of the real goal for the prospect of more.
Step 5: Adjusting your life for your ‘I have to do this’
There will be, hopefully, parts of your life that exist today that you cannot let go of. They are your non-negotiables. You must do them to like ‘you’. That might be reading, writing, running, building — I don’t know. For me, it’s writing and walking. I have to do those things otherwise I lose my happiness.
And so, my life is optimized for those things. I work a job I like that allows me to work from home most of the time, and that home happens to be in the middle of the most beautiful place in the UK.
I walk a lot and my plans for this year mostly involve doing a lot more walking. So the question is, what are the things that are you ‘I have to do this’ and there are no rules to this, it can be what you want.
You can build your life around that. Whilst that thing might not be (and in most cases isn’t) the thing that pays the bills, it can be the thing you orchestrate your life around. You can optimize your life for the stuff you love to do and don’t need to feel bad about it. If you simply love writing, get a job that allows you to write more often than not.
Final thought: Accept boredom
I read an insightful piece about boredom and it got me thinking, that sometimes, we’re overstimulated and need to take a step back and reduce the dopamine-inducing activities that trick us into thinking that life should be this adrenaline-fuelled amazing whirlwind adventure.
Most people’s lives aren’t like that. Fulfillment might just come from being bored and sitting in that boredom. To learn to just sit with your mind and unpick the things in it. To not be on every social media platform that exists ever. To just, exist.
And maybe that’s part of this. That we must accept boredom in work and play in order to thrive.
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Back to reading,
Eve 😊