Do a Job You're Unsuited To For a While

I recently left my job. It just wasn't for me. But I'm really glad I did it. It was the best mistake I've ever made. Permit me a moment of your time to explain why I think we should all do a job we're unsuited to for a while.

The Best Mistake I've Ever Made

Last year, I took a position working on a major, pressing geopolitical event. Naïve idealism, purpose and an imminent sense of political momentum led me to throw my hat into working on a challenging problem. Working at the heart of a world changing event was indeed enticing.

In earnest, this is the story I tell myself.

Actually, I half heartedly applied for a job a year before commencing, completed an application while sick and hesitated intensely before sleepwalking into it with undeliberate intent, urged on by people suggesting it might 'look decent' (if even one of these emerge during your preselection exercise for a vocation, think twice!) After two months I realised it really wasn't for me and managed to hold fast for a while before quitting.

Why Leave? The Mission Driven Approach

There's a plethora of reasons anyone may feel compelled to quit outright and start afresh elsewhere. Perhaps the workload is too much or too little, work emotionally soul crushing or overwhelming. Maybe you lack work life balance, or perhaps you're being held back from achieving your potential. Culture isn't quite right, people aren't on the same page. Maybe you're not being paid enough. Perhaps you're being paid too much and this is distracting you from following your passion.

Among peers however, something I've found very often is that people quit because it didn't cohere with their sense of mission (broadly defined). In some ways, formal labour is a conundrum. Work both is and isn't a defining aspect of one's life simultaneously, and this is a dichotomy one has to come to terms with. What do I mean by this?

Most of us spend more time at work than with our own families. And when we meet someone new, following the hi, hello and name exchange, we always seek awareness of what they do. Yet formal labour is only a fraction of a multifaceted telos. I'd actually argue it's disconnected to one's personal sense of Mission, though the two may align. Take a moment to ask yourself what you'd be doing in an ideal world, if money, status and time were no object. I'd be willing to bet many a reader would find a dissonance between their imagined vision and what they're actually doing now. I believe this represents the logical distinction between formal labour and a mission. Congratulations if they overlap! Perhaps you're doing what you should be. I'm sure this wasn't always the case, though.

Pivots and Pushing Yourself

Something Millennials are renowned for is that we're prone to taking career jumps with more frequency than Boomers or Gen Xers. Iterative decision making seems so baked into our generation's culture, in a way completely foreign to those from a different epoch. What I'd like to propose is that one of your iterations or pivots should be something you're unsuited to. Precisely because you won't enjoy it and won't be doing what you're fundamentally good at.

I heard a great piece of advice a while ago from someone on the internet (so it must be true!). Anything you find difficult, or have an aversion to (small details, seeing a bigger picture, filtering through complex spreadsheets etcetera) is just some area of cognitive underdevelopment. Taken as a general heuristic and not absolutely literally, I believe this to be accurate. Please indulge a personal example.

I have always been fascinated by technology. For years I've tried to understand code. Aged 16 I bought some Python books, spent hours typing and retyping print("Hello World!"), though every time I tried to move further I had a mental block, concluding I'm just not deeply technical enough.

My previous role required me to play with technical details in spreadsheets and edit legal texts, in which single words can change the whole architecture of an outcome. I didn't enjoy it much. I prefer dealing in strategic outcomes, analysis and understanding the effects of human beings and technology on one another. But one day I realised there must be a way to speed up the workflow. And from there I forced myself to learn some code. I can now write (very basic!) SQL queries and Python scripts with pleasure. I'm convinced doing what I was unsuited to actually helped fertilise my mind (or bequeath the confidence therein) to grapple with code, in a way I wouldn't have been able to, had I just pursued what I was good at outright.

But there's more. Forcing yourself to go through an unpleasant experience isn't just a lesson in perseverance, but the longer you force yourself, I venture, the more insights you unlock about your own mind. We often think of ourselves as rational. We think we know all there is to know of ourselves. Yet if we truly did, we wouldn't end up taking jobs we dislike, or being with the wrong people romantically. I think we have to learn by making controlled mistakes and leveraging these to maximise acceleration in the correct direction. I call this taking a slap in the face with such force, that the slap pushes you on course.

In some sense, you're eradicating bad options and a misaligned purpose by experiencing exactly what your misalignment is. It's learning Via Negativa, a concept I heard from Nassim Taleb drawn from Apophatic Theology, whereby God is understood as what God isn't. Likewise, I believe we learn more about ourselves by first learning what we aren't.

I unwittingly accelerated my learning in life by doing a job I was unsuited to for a while. Can you do the same?