The Best Career Advice Ever Sung
On cubicle farms, the Avett Brothers, and practicing contentment.
When I graduated from college, I made the practical decision. I moved to New York and took a good job at a good insurance company.
And when I saw my cubicle on the first day, a single cell in a vast grid, I cursed the gods and bemoaned my professional fate for one whole year. Then I quit.
Suffice it to say, the job was not a fit.
Besides oddball expressions of my discontentment - think rewriting Edgar Allan Poe verses about cubicle life - I spent my time getting done what needed to be done and day dreaming about leaving my job and moving to Montana to be a ranch hand vagabond poet.
This was the stuff of simple fantasy; escape the cubicle life for big sky country. But inherent in the fantasy was That Old Logic: “I’m not happy here, I would probably be happy there.”
At some point, prior to me cramming everything into a U-Haul and moving to Montana, it occurred to me that this fantasy contained a subtle flaw - that even if I went there I would still be me; that perhaps this discontentment was not merely a flaw in my geography.
In 2007 the Avett Brothers released their excellent album Emotionalism, the one that helped launch them into the stratosphere. I love that album, and I remember listening to the CD so much in my car during my 4th year of college that I knew all the places the songs would skip because of scratches and heat deformities (ah the joys of CDs…).
One of my favorites was “The Weight of Lies,” a song that includes the following lyrics:
The weight of lies will bring you down And follow you to every town ‘Cause nothing happens here that doesn't happen there So when you run make sure you run To something and not away from ‘Cause lies don't need an aeroplane to chase you anywhere
Now I’m not sure I can point directly to those lyrics as the source of insight I had about my desire to move to Montana, but that line has always stuck with me, when you run make sure you run / to something and not away from.
So much career anxiety depends upon that uncertainty. Will making this change solve that problem?
Is this the right thing to do? Am I moving for the right reason? Am I moving in the right direction?
In helping people think through big career decisions, a key part of the thought process is considering two questions:
What are you moving away from?
What are you moving toward?
The drive to look for something different, or to go somewhere different, is often simply a drive to feel different than you are feeling right now. And unless you attend to that feeling of discontentment directly, you may unintentionally pack up your problems and fly them to a new location, as it were.
On a recent episode of the podcast Smartless, the actor Tony Hale talked about navigating his career in show biz and the challenges that can emerge with always looking ahead, always wondering what’s coming next. He said, “if you’re not practicing contentment where you are, then you’re not going to be content when you get what you want.”
Now if you’ve read more than one of these newsletters (and I hope you have) you know that comments like this really snag my attention.
What struck me here is the idea of practicing contentment. The idea of contentment as a form of mental training at which we can become more proficient, rather than, say, a land into which we eventually arrive and settle. That is, perhaps contentment is a bit of an exercise in self-examination and learning to accept what you have and where you are, even when what you want is more, and better.
Somedays you may get further and feel stronger, some days not as much. But you keep at it. You try. You practice.
When I quit that job in New York, I was in escape mode.
If I’d taken time to consider what I was moving away from and what I was moving toward, I would have had a litany of things in the rearview and “something else” up ahead. But the job wasn’t the only source of discontentment I was wrestling with, and as you might imagine, that sense of discontentment made the trip with me and poked its head back up in Birmingham.
As the Avett Brothers put it, nothing happens here that doesn’t happen there.
Apply this Thinking
If you’re noodling on a big career decision, here’s an exercise that may help you process:
Get a piece of paper and write “Moving Away” on the top left and “Moving Toward” on the top right, then list all the things you can in each column. Whatever comes to mind counts: boss, commute, pay, growth opportunities, chance to lead, etc.
Go do that.
Once you’ve gotten all those thoughts on paper, take a look at which list is longer. Are you moving away from something or toward something? Just that thought can be a helpful orientation.
Then do this.
Reread those lists while thinking about values and try to assign a value (or two) to each item on each list. If you want help articulating values, this a good, simple resource.
What values is this decision prioritizing?
Are you moving from more risk taking and creative control to more stability and balance?
Are you aiming to prioritize earning for a season, or time with family, or personal growth and learning?
See if you boil it down to a sort of mission statement.
I am making this decision in order to prioritize my values of __________, __________, and __________, because what I really want to be doing with my time is ____________________.
Then check your work - talk this through with a spouse/family member/friend and have them ask questions about your logic. We humans are riddled with cognitive biases that impair our decision making (more on this some other time), and getting another perspective on the problem can sometimes help to surface areas where our thinking needs to be a bit more rigorous.
I do agree that too many folks make career changes because they're fleeing something without a clear strategy of moving towards something else. Or, they are moving toward fantasy, not anything that relates to what will make them content. I wrote recently about the problem with pursuing passions that are actually just fantasies. https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesrichardson/p/real-passion-emerges-from-expert?r=1mec6y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Here are few things I recently stumbled upon that I thought were relevant to this post. Posting them here if it's of interest!
First, Ralph Waldo Emerson on the peskiness of discontentment:
"At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from."
Second, @GeorgeSaunders on his writing process and the illusion of the land of contentment:
"The biggest thing I’ve learned over the years has to do with where to look for satisfaction in writing. There’s a very samsara-esque quality to this endeavor (well, to all endeavors, but). That is, there’s a predictable & cyclic quality to it all, that goes like this (and I’m sure this will be familiar to many of you): First, the feeling that I’ve got no ideas, and despair over that (“I’ve lost it! I’m finished!”). Then, an idea comes, or at least a place to start. Is it good? Months of work to find out, and: Yes, it is, or could be. Work, work, work. Finally I finish it, feeling good. Send it out. Maybe it’s accepted. Yay, it is! Ugh, I hope I don’t mess up the edits. But no: the editing process goes great. And now the story is coming out! Will people like it? Some do. Hooray! But wait: I’ve got no ideas.
Then it all starts over again, over and over, until I die at 120, busily enacting one of those phases described above.
So, there’s actually no settled place of fulfillment. And maybe that’s as it should be. What’s happened over the years is that, aware of the above, I’ve gotten marginally better at being content/happy during any/all of those phases, kind of like, “Oh, I’m in that phase now. That’s fun.” It’s still frustrating, scary, sometimes euphoric…but less so, or more controllably so - I can be in a certain phase of the creative process, struggling to move out of it, even as I’m looking over at myself struggling, slightly amused by the whole thing."