World Education

How do you know when it is time to quit your job? I would say the absolute first sign is dreading getting up each morning to go to your job. We’ve all heard this before, but doing something you are half way interested in is the most important aspect to working. For most of us this would obviously require a career change. But staying in a job that you do not like because you think the money is good is not the best thing to do because it’s simply just isn’t worth the money. What usually ends up happening is that your performance will suffer due to your lack of interest in your work. Your lack of interest will cause you to not “want” to learn. This is very dangerous. When it comes to things we are interested in, each of us has a unique ability to learn everything there is to know about it. For example, I had once worked as an engineer. It was an extremely boring job. I hated the work, I hated the environment, and I hated the people associated with that particular career field. As a result, even though I can be a very creative and an innovative problem solver with an endless capacity to become an expert on something, I had no desire to learn anything more that had to do with my field. College should have been my first clue being that I never found a single class I ever took to be interesting. But I was young and had different ideas at the time thinking that somehow once I got out into the working world it would become very exciting. I just figured that college was suppose to be hard and boring.

If you fall into this trap, it is quite simple what will end up happening. Over the years your performance will fail to develop and will suffer. It will become rather noticeable that you aren’t progressing to where you should be at certain stages in your career. Once this happens, you will be passed up for raises and you will be downgraded on your performance reviews. If this is starting to sound familiar, then get out of your job. You can leverage your work experience or educational degree to another career field. There are a lot of career fields out there that will hire people based on aptitude rather than on a specific educational degree or job experience. A person with a biology degree can go into sales as a pharm rep. A person with an engineering degree could possibly find a career as a financial adviser. Those are just a couple of examples.

Should you feel any sense of loyalty in your job? The answer is NO. Most of us work for major corporations. These corporations only see you as an animal. Even though you might have retained a vast amount of knowledge throughout your career, they will still let you go for an extra dollar that particular year. The CEO wants his performance bonus by providing a return to shareholders. He can careless about the talent pool that is demoted in salary or let go. He’ll leave that up to the company to clean up the mess by hiring new workers to attempt to come up to speed where you left off at. So if you ever start thinking about wanting to get out of your current job, by all means go for it. The corporations operating within our borders have already trashed up our country and completely ruined our political system. Don’t feel any guilt over quitting a job. Besides, you’ll probably end up working for the same people anyways since most corporations are interlocked in one way or another. You’ll just be doing something different.

The people that are living the worst lives are what I call “corporate nerds”. We have all seen these types of people. They are individuals that seem to absolutely love being at work. They are there early in the morning before you arrive, and they are still there after you leave. It might be one thing to do this if you are compensated with bonuses directly related to extra business you bring in, but it’s another if you are working overtime for free because you want to have a good performance review. Everywhere I have been, I have run into people like this. There are usually a few of them at every corporation. They are the ones that are truly throwing their lives away. They are trading their time to benefit the corporate satanists at the top. And these are usually the people that were complete losers in high school. You’ll notice that these particular people never join any happy hour outing with the rest of the workforce. They would rather stay at work to put in a few more hours. What ends up happening is that these individuals will put you into the middle or even lower box every year at performance review time. Most corporations will grade everyone based on a “bell curve”. These “corporate nerds” will upset this curve every year. And in most cases there is nothing that can be done anyhow because a lot of us, by luck of the draw, didn’t get assigned to an important enough project. So you are destined to underperform in situations such as this.

The bottom line is to not only find what you love, but to also find the love in what you do. Meaning, it is more worth your time on earth to have a job that pays $10-$20K less per year if you find it more enjoyable. For instance, I think studying the financial markets has more meaning in life and is funner than pursuing a career in engineering. That’s just me. Also, some of us can change as we age. As we age, our brains mature more. As a result, you might have a wider variety of interests than you once did. You might find that what you do for a living is rather dull and that you might want to try something new. This can make life stressful mid-career, but don’t be afraid of change. You only get one shot at life. Don’t continue through a career working a boring job for an idiot manager that couldn’t do your job himself or herself, but yet is qualified to grade you on your performance. Find a new job, negotiate a good wage, turn in your two week notice if you have vacation days left, and then give your manager the finger on the way out.

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