INTRODUCTION

THE CAREER QUESTION ON EVERYONE’S MIND

It took me three years as a careers reporter to crack the code.

After countless stories advising readers how to earn a plum promotion, manage a team for the first time, and ask their boss for help without looking foolish, I’d pinpointed the question people really wanted answers to.

SHOULD I QUIT MY JOB?

At Insider, the digital media outlet where I still work, I had access to real-time data on how many people were reading my articles. All I had to do was look up at the Chartbeat app displayed on the big-screen television above my desk, in the corner of the eighth floor of a shiny office building in New York City’s Financial District.

Every time I published a story on deciding to quit, I’d watch those Chartbeat numbers creep higher and higher. Evidently there were a lot of professionals who felt frustrated in their jobs and wanted a way out. Some of them were, in all likelihood, members of the black- and gray-clad crowds I could see rushing to and from work on Liberty Street whenever I took a break to stare out the window.

In an effort to sate readers’ appetites (and yes, to see that traffic surge), I started publishing more stories on quitting, and on related issues like what to do if you’re miserable at work and how to know whether you’re finally ready to pursue something entrepreneurial.

It wasn’t just the bump in readership I enjoyed. I loved the way people’s voices changed when they described the moment they decided to leave their six-figure consulting job or start their own business or go back to school and get their master’s degree in education. Some people got quiet and reflective. Others perked up and talked breathlessly about the color-coded spreadsheet that helped them make the transition. Always, it was as though they were newly delighted to learn that it was possible to take control of their career trajectory.

Then, about a year after discovering this formula for blockbuster-hit articles, I got the sense that maybe I was doing readers a disservice. I remember walking from my office to the subway early one evening and wondering if I’d been perpetuating a form of “quitting porn.” Was I playing into people’s secret fantasies about upending their life and doing something totally new, encouraging them to think that these daydreams could become reality if only they wanted them badly enough? If so, I felt somewhat ashamed.

Because while giving your two weeks’ notice can be liberating, it’s not always the most practical move.

In reality, career transitions often require significant mental, emotional, and financial bandwidth. Some of us don’t have that capacity at the moment. If you’re supporting a young family, or you have student loans to pay off, or you work 12 hours a day and by the time you come home you’re too exhausted to start identifying your core skills and passions, a major life overhaul might not be in the cards. Telling people they can take a big leap is asking them to buy into an admittedly tantalizing fantasy.

Especially when there are simpler paths to job satisfaction.

Looking back through interviews I’d conducted with organizational psychologists and influential business leaders, I realized that enjoying your job isn’t a black-and-white issue: It’s not a case of either you stick around and suck it up, or you leave and try to find something better. When it comes to your work life, you probably have more options than you think. There’s a vast middle ground between those two extremes, where you keep your day job and make small-scale changes that help you feel a whole lot better about work.

In fact, you can generally use these strategies without your boss’s input or permission. You might, for example, try shifting your mindset around meaningful work. Even if you’re not a surgeon saving lives, helping your clients get their work done faster is no small thing. You might take up a hobby as a way to broaden your identity beyond the scope of your day job. Or you might simply stop beating yourself up for holding onto an unfulfilling gig that allows you to provide for your kids. These are just some of the strategies that career experts recommend and that the working professionals I’ve interviewed use to their advantage.

The important piece is being able to see possibility ahead of you. Just knowing that you have options—beyond staying or leaving—can be empowering. You’ll feel less stuck because you’ll know that your job satisfaction is largely up to you, as opposed to your boss or the vicissitudes of the global economy. You have agency within your own career, even if you don’t yet recognize it.

I’ve been inching toward this book since the day I joined the Insider newsroom in 2015, though I didn’t know it then. Over the past seven years I’ve interviewed academics, clinical psychologists, career coaches, and longtime executives about the best ways to build a successful work life. I’ve learned about the importance of things like growth mindset, managing up, and mapping out your transferable skills. I’ve also spoken with dozens of professionals across industries about the career development strategies that have, and haven’t, worked for them.

While readers were devouring the stories I wrote on quitting, I realized people needed to understand all their options for feeling happier at work.

One thing I’ve learned on this beat is that absolutely everyone has a story about their career. Maybe they chose their current line of work out of necessity, but their true passion lies elsewhere. Maybe they took a menial job expecting to stay for months and ended up staying for decades. Maybe they started a business, watched it bomb, and reentered the corporate world, though secretly they’d like to try again. For each of these individuals, there’s a path to greater happiness at work, no matter how out of reach it may seem. Even if they don’t wind up crafting the perfect job, they’ll be able to discern what about their work experience is within their locus of control and how they can make it better.

I have a career story, too. (Writing about the workplace doesn’t necessarily make you smarter about your own career choices.) I’ve stayed too long in a job that wasn’t working out; I’ve lost a job I cherished due to financial constraints on the company. I’ve also come close to making rash decisions while working at Insider—an organization that I love and that has supported my steady growth as a journalist—because things weren’t going exactly as I would have liked.

In a way, this book is filled with the insights and advice that could have helped me at all these different junctures in my career. Mostly this book would have helped me see that I had the power to reshape my own work experience—and that the reshaping process could actually be pretty easy.

It can be easy for you, too.

A USER’S GUIDE TO THIS BOOK

Each chapter in this book will challenge your thinking around a different aspect of your work life. I’ve divided the book into three parts:

•   Part One. Evaluate and Reevaluate (Chapters 1 through 4)

•   Part Two. Take Action (Chapters 5 through 8)

•   Part Three. Give Yourself Other Options (Chapters 9 through 12)

In Part One, you’ll consider the benefits of sticking around when everyone else is jumping ship, ask yourself whether quitting is the best way to get what you want, learn to recognize when you’re being influenced by cultural narratives about work, clarify what’s going well in your career and what isn’t, and come up with a personal definition of “meaning.”

In Part Two, you’ll consider different ways in which passion for work can manifest, start tackling the small stuff about your job that drives you crazy, tailor your role to what you really care about, and zero in on your own learning and development.

In Part Three, you’ll map out ways in which your employer can promote your career development, identify other sources of fulfillment in your life besides work, make a plan for cautiously transitioning to entrepreneurship, and test the decision to quit using a series of expert-approved frameworks.

Each chapter concludes with a “Remember This” recap and with what I call a “Try This” exercise, which is designed to help you apply the ideas discussed in the chapter to your own situation.

I hope you read all 12 chapters. But feel free to skip around based on which sections you feel are most relevant to where you are in your career right now.

Let’s dive in.