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Do you love your work? Or do you work because you want/need the paycheck and the recognition from society that you get from being part of the daily grind? Are you happy getting out of bed on Mondays or do you begin to plunge into a state of melancholy after Sunday dinner? If you hate your job should you just quit? Tell your co-workers “I’ll be right back” and have them wondering where you went for the next week?

Quitting isn’t for losers

You’ve probably heard the oft-quoted mantra that “quitting is for losers”. Stick-to-itiveness is a quality that is generally admired and praised. There is a sense that no matter what life throws at you that you should always keep going forward. I mean “when the going gets tough, then the tough get going” - and they’re not running away from their problems.

While there is some truth to this, smart and successful people also know when to quit. Winners quick fast, quit often and quit without the guilt associated with giving something up. When times get tough, successful people assess the situation and don’t keep going forward if all that they will reach is a dead-end. Just because you may have put lots of effort into a job or career in the past doesn’t mean that you have to keep pursuing it. If you’ve made mistakes in the past that’s not really a big problem. The big error is to realize that you’ve made mistakes and to keep making the same ones over and over again.

There’s a nice book by Seth Godin on this topic called The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick). I highly recommend it.

But quitting won’t make you happy

There is a catch though. Quitting a job won’t make you happy by itself. In the short run it will probably make you feel more anxious and worried given your newfound lack of a steady income stream. It may also make you feel lonely if your entire social community has been built upon your coworkers.

Clearly, quitting is not always the right answer. If everyone just quit what they were doing at the first sign of discomfort, nothing would get accomplished. We’d all just be lazy. On the other hand, you can’t just run blindly in pursuit of something just because that’s what you’ve been doing in the past. Just because you’ve spent 10 years of your life in preparation of one particular job or career, doesn’t mean that you’ve got to spend 10 more years stuck in the same position. It likely having an old car with mechanical problems. You may feel an attachment to the car, but there comes a point where its better to sell it off than to keep pumping money into it to fix it.

So how do you know when to quit? If you’re designing your life by conscious thought you can do a simple economic cost/benefit analysis of a decision like quit. The key is knowing the variables that you need to measure. There can be lots of these, but for simplicity’s sake, I like using the following three: time, money and health.

1. Time - Your life is not a renewable resource. You only have one shot at living it to its fullest extent. Asking yourself what you should do with your life isn’t just a matter of finding a career that you can tolerate. It’s about choosing how you are going to spend the precious hours of your life that you have been blessed with. Its about deciding how you are going to use the opportunity of life. Are you going to spend your time “working for the man”, or are you going to use it to be true to your individual nature, values and beliefs?

So ask yourself, how much of my life am I spending because of my job? Don’t forget to count commuting or travelling time, time spent working at home, time spent to get yourself mental prepared for work each day, and the time spent each day to unwind your mind from your job.

Then ask yourself what percentage of your life you are devoting to your work? Is it 20%, 40% or 60% or more. For instance, let’s say that you work a pretty standard 9 hours a day and that your commute is short, 30 minutes each way. Let’s say that you spend half an hour each day getting ready for work in the morning and another half an hour “de-stressing” after work. Let’s say that you’re lucky and you only have to put in three hours on the weekend reviewing your files and that you can do this from home so that you don’t have to commute. That’s 58 hours per week. Assuming that you get two weeks of vacation a year (and that you never waste time worrying about your job while on vacation), that’s 2900 hours a year! Or about one-third of your life. Now imagine putting in 80 hour weeks in the office and constantly worrying about your job when you’re not there. Is your life worth it?

2. Money - This brings to the great denominator of life, money. Surely putting in all the long hours is worth it if you bring in the big bucks? From a purely economic point of view it might be. Time and labour is the quid pro quo that you have to give up to earn money, and I’m certainly not naive enough to say that money doesn’t matter. Money matters - you need money to live properly. The amount of money that you think that you need to live happily might be vastly overstated, but that fact remains that being destitute isn’t most people’s lifestyle choice.

That being said, when comparing the amount of time that you spend on the job with the monetary rewards that you get, you must remember to measure all the money that you spend solely because of your job. Do you need invest in a new wardrobe? A second car? Daycare for your children? Would you want or need these things if you didn’t have to go to work each day? If the answer is no, then you’ve got to subtract these from your after-tax salary.

And that brings up another point. If you choose to be employed it is pretty hard to avoid the wrath of Uncle Sam since your taxes are deducted directly from your paycheck. And the scope of permitted deductions as an employee is far narrower than it is if you were self-employed. So ask yourself if working those long hours is really worth it if 40% of your “compensation” goes directly to Uncle Sam?

3. Well-Being - By well-being I’m not referring to your physical health alone. I’m really referring to health or “being” in an all-encompassing holistic way. While time and money can be quantified in a relatively easy way, well-being is a variable that is qualitiative in nature. The amount of time and money can thus give you some perspective, but ultimately it is your “being that is determinative. One’s life is ultimately measured by who they are and not by what they have. So when deciding what to do with your life you’ve got to evaluate how it affects who you are and how it affects your physical, mental, spiritual, emotional and social well-being.

This is an intensly personal inquiry that takes a fair bit of courage to undertake. You have to ask yourself how your job is affecting your happiness, your relationships, your self-confidence, your sanity and your physical health. Does working long hours prevent you from forming lasting relationships? Has it stopped you from exercising or forced you onto a steady diet of greasy fast food? Has the stress of the workplace gotten you so frazzled that you’re ready to attack anyone that offers you a suggestion?

The effects of your job on your well-being are endless and don’t think that they are all negative. Seeing how your work positively impacts others can bring a deep sense of fulfillment to your life. The relationships that you build with co-workers or clients can be meaningful. The stresses of your job can be positive if you embrace the challenges that it offers. The praise that you earn from a job well done can build your self-confidence. Even working long hours can be fulfilling if you’re able to do so in a sense of flow, a state of mind where you are fully immersed in what you are doing.

There are no right answers here, only questions that you have to continually keep posing yourself. If you choose to pursue a job or career, it is imperative that you periodically re-evaluate it to ensure that you’re still travelling on the path that you want to be on. If you do this honestly you may find that its time that you seriously consider quitting your job or changing the parts of it that are damaging your well-being. Or you may find that despite working for long hours and earning little money, that your job is so emotionally fulfilling that you wouldn’t trade it for the world.

The key is to remember that you are allowed to be true to yourself. The economy is huge, and you don’t have to grind it out forever in a job that you hate. You can earn a sufficient living doing almost anything if you put your mind into it. The choice is yours. Remember, it is not what you do that defines who you are, but who you are that defines what you must do.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Career, Fulfillment, Happiness, Health, Money, Self-Awareness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.