In this episode of “Lessons From A Quitter,” we tackle the daunting task of learning to love your job, even when you don’t like it. I share four practical tips to shift your mindset and improve your work life. I also emphasize finding aspects of the job you appreciate, understanding the balance of good and bad in any role, distinguishing between short-term and long-term goals, and recognizing the different seasons of life. This episode is packed with actionable advice to help you manage your current situation while planning for a fulfilling future.
How to Love Your Job Even if You Don't Like it
Ep. 317
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Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.
Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. 'cause today I wanna talk to you about something very important and serious. For a lot of you, I wanna teach you how to love your job. When you don't like it, that might sound kind of impossible. You might be thinking, why would I love it if I don't like it? A lot of you are stuck in careers that you don't wanna be in, and there could be a million reasons for that.
Maybe you have to stay to pay off debt. Maybe you signed a contract to stay on for a certain amount of time. Maybe you wanna stay in this job because it helps your resume and you wanna network in order to get you where you wanna go. There's a lot of reasons where our short-term goal doesn't align with what we wanna do. Long-term in our life, we don't. We know we're not gonna be here forever. We know we don't love it, but we have to do the hard thing and stay. Maybe it's because you don't know what else you would do and you're trying to give yourself some time to figure that out, to explore, to try new things. I love that for you. But the fact remains that we have to stay somewhere that we don't like, and I help people learn how to manage that, learn how to deal with that so that you're not miserable the whole time so that you're not dreading Monday and living for Friday and hating your life.
And so today I wanna give you kind of four tips that I want you to think about in order to help you actually like where you're at. Love your job even if you don't like it. Okay? The first thing that I want you to think about and that I want you to do is I want you to find one thing that you do like about it. I don't care if it's the coffee that they serve in the cafeteria. I don't care if it's just the money. That's a great reason to love a job. Like when that paycheck hits every two weeks, my bank account, I love it. It's the best feeling. I love that security. I love knowing it's gonna come. I love knowing that I can pay my bills. I love that I can take care of myself. I love that about this job, and that's the only thing I love.
Fine. We're gonna focus on that. I want you to think about the way that your brain works. Like whatever you focus on, the energy around it grows. I'm gonna give you a quick example. Have you ever been like annoyed by something really small? Let's say like the way someone chews or laughs or something, you're around them and you're like, oh God, that's kind of annoying. You start focusing on it, you start noticing it, you start seeing it every time they're around and it starts growing and growing and you start getting to the point where you're like, I'm going to murder them. I can't be around this person. I cannot listen to them, chew this loud again, right? It's not as though the act of their chewing changed, it's that your focus changed. It went from this thing that you slightly noticed being annoying to something that is now like taking over all of your awareness and it's grating on your nerves.
And this happens all the time for all of us. The same thing is true with positive things. By the way, that is why study after study has shown that like one of the easiest and most effective ways of increasing happiness in your life is to have a gratitude journal. I know it sounds woo woo and we wanna kind of write it off, but it will truly change your life. And it takes five minutes a day. And all it is is for you to look for something you're grateful for that day and write it down. Because what happens is that your brain starts scanning your environment, looking for things to come up with, to be grateful for. If you tell your brain like every day, I wanna like find something new that I'm grateful for, your brain will start looking for that. The same way that let's say you, you know, wanna buy a new car and all of a sudden you see that car everywhere, your brain will show you the things that you tell it is important to you, right?
The rest of it, it filters out. We get so much information all the time, our brain has to filter out like 90% of it. And so it starts letting in the things that you're like, huh, this is important to me. So when you tell your brain like, I wanna look for things that are going well in my life, I wanna look for things that are going right, it starts looking for those things. And lo and behold, you start finding a lot of those things because most things actually go right in your life. Most things are going according to plan. You make it to work on time. You don't get in a car accident, you don't get pulled over, you get your work done. No big huge accidents happen. You make it home on time. Everybody's healthy. Like all of those things are really good things that happen.
But on our day-to-day, we just kind of brush over them, right? When you start seeking it out, you start seeing it. The same thing happens at your job. When you are unhappy somewhere, you tend to look for all the things you hate. And then those things grow, right? You look for the coworker that you hate, that's annoying. And then all you can do is just hear their annoying chatter all day every day, right? You look for how your boss is micromanaging, and then even before he opens his mouth, you're like, I know it. I know it. I know he's gonna come micromanage something. I know he's gonna say something to me that's gonna me off. You're seeking it out. And that starts growing and growing. This is what happens with so many people who start out like at a job that's, you know, maybe not their favorite, but it's not toxic.
It's not like an abusive place. It's just a job. And they start out being like, oh, this is kind of annoying, or this person's annoying. And then it gets to the point where they're like, I cannot stand it here. I have to quit. I can't be here one more day. This is gonna drive me nuts. Nothing has actually happened again, like you're getting paid to do a task, but you've made it so big in your head that you know, the way this person acts, the way that person talks, the way they give assignments, the way they, you know, record time, the way they give their paychecks, whatever is annoying. I'm just gonna keep focusing it on. I'm gonna about it to my coworkers. I'm gonna come home and about it to my spouse. I'm gonna talk about it with my friends. I'm gonna talk about how terrible everything else, and then my unhappiness just grows.
I'm not actually changing anything. I'm not quitting, I'm still staying here. I'm just gonna make myself more unhappy. And so I want you to shift that focus. I want you to look for the things that are actually okay. I want you to look for like, even if it's just the paycheck. Like, hey, I signed up to do a job to get that paycheck and that is a mighty nice paycheck I get and I'm just gonna think about all the things I'm grateful for from that paycheck, right? Or maybe it's something else. Like I know for me, I never realized how much I actually really loved having coworkers and not working alone, you know? And being able to chitchat with people. I'm a outgoing person and I like having that kind of human connection. And now that I work for myself and I'm alone a lot of the time, I miss that.
And I realize I was never grateful enough for that when I worked in an office. So you can also think about like what are things that I'm gonna miss when I leave? Maybe it's my office, B, FF. Maybe it's like the free lunch program. Maybe it's doing some interesting work. Like no matter how annoying everybody is, I actually like what I'm doing. Whatever it is, I want you to find it and I want you to focus on it. And I want you to bring it to your awareness. And I want you to think about how great it is. And I want you to think about other things that are great at that job. I think this isn't the same as like act like everything's happy, put on a happy face, like toxic positivity. You can not like it and you can know that you wanna leave.
You can also do that without making yourself miserable Every day. You can decide like, this is not gonna be my long term and I'm gonna choose to move to the next thing in my life without making it worse than it has to be. So that's number one. Number two is you have to understand the concept that everywhere you work, anywhere you go, it's gonna be 50 50. And what I mean by that is that it's gonna be both good and bad. It doesn't matter if it's your dream job, I promise you, it doesn't matter how fulfilled and wonderful it is, there will be half the things that you don't like doing. It's the nature of everything in life. And I think that one of the biggest misconceptions we've been taught is that there is some place where it's gonna be rainbows and butterflies. We're gonna love it, everything's gonna be wonderful.
And I hate to be the bear of that bad news, but there just isn't. I can tell you like right now, I love my business. I absolutely love mindset coaching. I love helping people. I love so many aspects of it and I hate 50% of it because while I may love the podcast and I love coming up with content ideas and I love coaching, I hate the backend. I hate figuring out taxes and figuring out content calendars and figuring out all the new technology and you know, looking at what is working and what isn't. I'm not very detail oriented. So like anything that's very detail oriented is just not my jam. But guess what? That is what's required in any business, there's gonna be both. And I think it's such a disservice to not understand this concept because a lot of you will go to a different job hoping that the next job is just gonna magically fix everything.
And you're gonna go there and some things are gonna be great. Maybe you're gonna have coworkers you like, or you're gonna work on matters that are really fulfilling. But there's gonna be a lot of things you're gonna gonna like. There's gonna be another coworker that you don't like, or the clients are gonna be too demanding or the deadlines are unreasonable, or the software you use is clunky and outta date, whatever, whatever it is. And I think that what happens is that we end up then feeling like is there's something wrong with me? I'm never gonna be happy anywhere. As opposed to knowing like this is just gonna be the way that it is anywhere. Now, it's not to say that it can't be a different set of 50 50, right? For me, when I was working as a lawyer, I had a lot of stress, a lot of frustration, a lot of boredom, a lot of unfulfillment.
I also felt very secure. I had like a really good salary. I felt successful. You know, my ego was doing real great 'cause people thought I was a success. That was kind of my 50 50 when I became an entrepreneur. I don't have the same security, right? So my 50 50 is like there's a lot of instability, there's a lot of insecurity around that. There was a lot of like fear of failing in front of people and fear of being judged. Like that was the negative emotion, the 50% I had to deal with. But on the other side, I was very fulfilled and I'm very excited about a lot of the work that I do and I feel super passionate about a lot of these things. And so again, it might be different. And it's not to say that you can't seek something that is more aligned with you.
I just want you to know that when you go, it's gonna be like that too. And I tell you that right now where you're at so that you can know, like I think a lot of times we think I'm missing out on something where I'm gonna go and it's gonna be a hundred percent wonderful and it's not. So maybe I can slow down. Like maybe the fact that I have to stay here is like, yeah, it sucks, but I'm gonna have to deal with 50 50 there anyways. So if I'm gonna like get a benefit here because I'm gonna network or I'm gonna make money or I'm gonna pay off debt or whatever it might be, maybe I can focus on like what's the 50 50 that's good here. What's the 50 50 that I can deal with? And I can know like yes, I can go for bigger and better things and I'm still gonna have to deal with some unwanted aspects of the next job.
There is no rush. Like even if it takes me another year here, there's no like utopia that I'm going to. The third thing that I want you to think about is the fact that there's a difference between short-term and long-term goals. I think for a lot of people we think there's just one goal. And so we get really antsy and frustrated when we can't act on that goal. So let's say my goal is to become a writer randomly. Let's say I'm gonna, I wanna become an author. In my mind I start like kind of focusing in on like, well, I'm not doing that right now. I'm at this job and every day that goes by in this job, I'm not working on becoming a writer, right? Or I'm not working on my craft, you know? And I look at other people on social media and I compare myself to other people that are publishing things and I get more and more upset.
But you really have to understand the difference between your short term and your long-term goals. And oftentimes your short-term goals are what are gonna set you up to be able to go after your long-term goals. It's like building a foundation. It's like brick by brick. You're building these goals and these dreams that you have and what a beautiful thing it is. But you have to know like what is the short term goal here that is setting me up, right? Maybe I'm not working as an author right now, but I am working at a job to pay off my debt so that I can be a writer without crushing student loans. Like I'm hooking my future self up with that, right? I am setting myself up so that I don't have to deal with this debt when I have a job as an author that may not be as stable, that could be my short term that's helping me get to the place I want to be, right?
Maybe it's that I need to network here and I need to get certain connections before I try to grow my own business, right? My short term goal, if I focus on like fine, then I'm going to knock this outta the park. I'm going to network my little booty off. I am going to make as many connections as I can because that is what I'm focused on here. And I don't have to keep berating myself or losing focus on the fact of like, well, I'm not building my business. The more I'm doing this, I'm not doing that. It's like, but this is building towards that. And so I want you to really think about like what is your short-term goal here? And how is that setting you up to go after bigger and better dreams later on? How does that fit into the plan? Because when you have that purpose behind why you're doing it, and it's not just simply like I'm just wasting my life away somewhere that I don't wanna be, it becomes easier to bear it.
It becomes easier to know the purpose behind what you're doing and make that a little bit more purposeful, for lack of a better word. Like make it that there's a reason that I am here and that reason will ultimately hook my future self up. And I'm excited about that. And the last thing that I want you to think about is this concept that your life is in seasons. We are not taught this in our society by any means. We are. The way that our hustle, culture and capitalism has sort of groomed us all to believe like programmed us is that we are robots and that we are gonna have the same level of output and we're gonna have the same level of productivity and we should be the same person year in and year out, season in, season out. We should always be able to do the same exact thing, which when you think about it consciously is absurd, right?
No human being works like that. Like there's obviously going to be times when you're sick or you didn't sleep at night, or you have young kids or you're taking care of your elderly parents, or you have a bad breakup or whatever it is where your emotions are in the way where you are physically maybe not able to work in the same way. That is not a weakness, that is literally life. And every single one of us is gonna go through it, has gone through it will go through it multiple times. And the more you start looking at your life in seasons, the easier it becomes to handle when you're in a particular season that may not be the most exciting or the one you wanna be in, right? You might be in a season right now where you have young kids and maybe it's not the time to go hard on your business.
Like maybe it is the time to like stay in a job that provides you healthcare and you know, is stable enough for you to be able to take care of your small children. Or maybe it is a season where you're going through depression and you don't have the capacity to build a business on the side. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. And I think that the more we start understanding like how long our lives are and how much time we have to live and work and that these seasons are gonna come and go, and it's just that it is a season. There will come a season where you can push hard, where maybe you don't have as much responsibility where you do have the capacity to do more. Great. Then when that season comes, then you can let yourself go full out. The problem in our society is that we try to go full out all the time for years and years and decades and decades, and then we wonder why we burn out and we wonder why we can't maintain it.
Because you were never meant to. It was never meant to be the way that your life was supposed to be. Just because we set that up in society doesn't mean that that's how it's supposed to be. And so I want you to really think about what is the season that you're in right now. Maybe this season is like we talked about with the short term goal, like setting yourself up for a later season. Maybe this is a season to take the foot off the gas and give yourself some breathing room and let yourself just be, maybe it's a season to take care of other important things like your family and your community and not your career. That's okay too. All of it's okay. And I think that when you know like you're running your own race, somebody else might be in a season where they're going hard and you're gonna see their business flourish and they're gonna put, you know everything they can and they're gonna press down on the gas, great.
That's their season. I guarantee you they're gonna get to a season where that's gonna stop. It's not a good or a bad thing, it just is what it is. And so when you can start putting the blinders on and really asking yourself like, what season am I in and how do I take care of myself in this season? How do I have compassion for myself and give myself grace and show up for myself and have my own back? Like this is the season and it will change. Promise you it'll change and I'll have more time and I will have more energy. You know, once I take care of whatever it is I need to take care of in this short term, I can have another period where it's go time and then how great is that? And then that season will end. And I feel like when you understand that concept, it becomes easier to not get into this all or nothing thinking of like, this is the end.
I'm just gonna be at this job forever. It's never gonna change. I'm never gonna be happy, I'm never gonna find anything like, which is not true. So you have to remind yourself of those four things. I think if you look for the thing that you do like at your job, if you focus on the 50 50 that is here and what is the good part, what is the bad? If you know your short-term goals versus your long-term goals and you look at your life as a seasons, it makes it so much more bearable to be where you're at to like let yourself exhale a little bit to let yourself understand that like everything doesn't have to change or be different right now, I'm telling you, it is available to you to be able to actually like where you are, even if you don't love the job. It's available to you to manage your own mind so that you're not constantly dreading it and hating your life. Even if this career is not it for you. You still don't have to hate the day to day. And if you want help with that, if you wanna learn how to manage your mind and manage your thoughts so that you're not dreading every day, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club, which is my membership. You can go to lessons from a quitter.com/quitterclub where we do this work, where you get the coaching, where you learn how to apply this stuff to your situation that you can actually not hate the majority of your day, every day during your waking hours and all of your adult life. And we can start figuring out the season you're in now and setting you up for that long-term goal when you change seasons later.
All right, my friends, I hope that this was helpful and I will see you next week for another episode.
Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. 'cause today I wanna talk to you about something very important and serious. For a lot of you, I wanna teach you how to love your job. When you don't like it, that might sound kind of impossible. You might be thinking, why would I love it if I don't like it? A lot of you are stuck in careers that you don't wanna be in, and there could be a million reasons for that.
Maybe you have to stay to pay off debt. Maybe you signed a contract to stay on for a certain amount of time. Maybe you wanna stay in this job because it helps your resume and you wanna network in order to get you where you wanna go. There's a lot of reasons where our short-term goal doesn't align with what we wanna do. Long-term in our life, we don't. We know we're not gonna be here forever. We know we don't love it, but we have to do the hard thing and stay. Maybe it's because you don't know what else you would do and you're trying to give yourself some time to figure that out, to explore, to try new things. I love that for you. But the fact remains that we have to stay somewhere that we don't like, and I help people learn how to manage that, learn how to deal with that so that you're not miserable the whole time so that you're not dreading Monday and living for Friday and hating your life.
And so today I wanna give you kind of four tips that I want you to think about in order to help you actually like where you're at. Love your job even if you don't like it. Okay? The first thing that I want you to think about and that I want you to do is I want you to find one thing that you do like about it. I don't care if it's the coffee that they serve in the cafeteria. I don't care if it's just the money. That's a great reason to love a job. Like when that paycheck hits every two weeks, my bank account, I love it. It's the best feeling. I love that security. I love knowing it's gonna come. I love knowing that I can pay my bills. I love that I can take care of myself. I love that about this job, and that's the only thing I love.
Fine. We're gonna focus on that. I want you to think about the way that your brain works. Like whatever you focus on, the energy around it grows. I'm gonna give you a quick example. Have you ever been like annoyed by something really small? Let's say like the way someone chews or laughs or something, you're around them and you're like, oh God, that's kind of annoying. You start focusing on it, you start noticing it, you start seeing it every time they're around and it starts growing and growing and you start getting to the point where you're like, I'm going to murder them. I can't be around this person. I cannot listen to them, chew this loud again, right? It's not as though the act of their chewing changed, it's that your focus changed. It went from this thing that you slightly noticed being annoying to something that is now like taking over all of your awareness and it's grating on your nerves.
And this happens all the time for all of us. The same thing is true with positive things. By the way, that is why study after study has shown that like one of the easiest and most effective ways of increasing happiness in your life is to have a gratitude journal. I know it sounds woo woo and we wanna kind of write it off, but it will truly change your life. And it takes five minutes a day. And all it is is for you to look for something you're grateful for that day and write it down. Because what happens is that your brain starts scanning your environment, looking for things to come up with, to be grateful for. If you tell your brain like every day, I wanna like find something new that I'm grateful for, your brain will start looking for that. The same way that let's say you, you know, wanna buy a new car and all of a sudden you see that car everywhere, your brain will show you the things that you tell it is important to you, right?
The rest of it, it filters out. We get so much information all the time, our brain has to filter out like 90% of it. And so it starts letting in the things that you're like, huh, this is important to me. So when you tell your brain like, I wanna look for things that are going well in my life, I wanna look for things that are going right, it starts looking for those things. And lo and behold, you start finding a lot of those things because most things actually go right in your life. Most things are going according to plan. You make it to work on time. You don't get in a car accident, you don't get pulled over, you get your work done. No big huge accidents happen. You make it home on time. Everybody's healthy. Like all of those things are really good things that happen.
But on our day-to-day, we just kind of brush over them, right? When you start seeking it out, you start seeing it. The same thing happens at your job. When you are unhappy somewhere, you tend to look for all the things you hate. And then those things grow, right? You look for the coworker that you hate, that's annoying. And then all you can do is just hear their annoying chatter all day every day, right? You look for how your boss is micromanaging, and then even before he opens his mouth, you're like, I know it. I know it. I know he's gonna come micromanage something. I know he's gonna say something to me that's gonna me off. You're seeking it out. And that starts growing and growing. This is what happens with so many people who start out like at a job that's, you know, maybe not their favorite, but it's not toxic.
It's not like an abusive place. It's just a job. And they start out being like, oh, this is kind of annoying, or this person's annoying. And then it gets to the point where they're like, I cannot stand it here. I have to quit. I can't be here one more day. This is gonna drive me nuts. Nothing has actually happened again, like you're getting paid to do a task, but you've made it so big in your head that you know, the way this person acts, the way that person talks, the way they give assignments, the way they, you know, record time, the way they give their paychecks, whatever is annoying. I'm just gonna keep focusing it on. I'm gonna about it to my coworkers. I'm gonna come home and about it to my spouse. I'm gonna talk about it with my friends. I'm gonna talk about how terrible everything else, and then my unhappiness just grows.
I'm not actually changing anything. I'm not quitting, I'm still staying here. I'm just gonna make myself more unhappy. And so I want you to shift that focus. I want you to look for the things that are actually okay. I want you to look for like, even if it's just the paycheck. Like, hey, I signed up to do a job to get that paycheck and that is a mighty nice paycheck I get and I'm just gonna think about all the things I'm grateful for from that paycheck, right? Or maybe it's something else. Like I know for me, I never realized how much I actually really loved having coworkers and not working alone, you know? And being able to chitchat with people. I'm a outgoing person and I like having that kind of human connection. And now that I work for myself and I'm alone a lot of the time, I miss that.
And I realize I was never grateful enough for that when I worked in an office. So you can also think about like what are things that I'm gonna miss when I leave? Maybe it's my office, B, FF. Maybe it's like the free lunch program. Maybe it's doing some interesting work. Like no matter how annoying everybody is, I actually like what I'm doing. Whatever it is, I want you to find it and I want you to focus on it. And I want you to bring it to your awareness. And I want you to think about how great it is. And I want you to think about other things that are great at that job. I think this isn't the same as like act like everything's happy, put on a happy face, like toxic positivity. You can not like it and you can know that you wanna leave.
You can also do that without making yourself miserable Every day. You can decide like, this is not gonna be my long term and I'm gonna choose to move to the next thing in my life without making it worse than it has to be. So that's number one. Number two is you have to understand the concept that everywhere you work, anywhere you go, it's gonna be 50 50. And what I mean by that is that it's gonna be both good and bad. It doesn't matter if it's your dream job, I promise you, it doesn't matter how fulfilled and wonderful it is, there will be half the things that you don't like doing. It's the nature of everything in life. And I think that one of the biggest misconceptions we've been taught is that there is some place where it's gonna be rainbows and butterflies. We're gonna love it, everything's gonna be wonderful.
And I hate to be the bear of that bad news, but there just isn't. I can tell you like right now, I love my business. I absolutely love mindset coaching. I love helping people. I love so many aspects of it and I hate 50% of it because while I may love the podcast and I love coming up with content ideas and I love coaching, I hate the backend. I hate figuring out taxes and figuring out content calendars and figuring out all the new technology and you know, looking at what is working and what isn't. I'm not very detail oriented. So like anything that's very detail oriented is just not my jam. But guess what? That is what's required in any business, there's gonna be both. And I think it's such a disservice to not understand this concept because a lot of you will go to a different job hoping that the next job is just gonna magically fix everything.
And you're gonna go there and some things are gonna be great. Maybe you're gonna have coworkers you like, or you're gonna work on matters that are really fulfilling. But there's gonna be a lot of things you're gonna gonna like. There's gonna be another coworker that you don't like, or the clients are gonna be too demanding or the deadlines are unreasonable, or the software you use is clunky and outta date, whatever, whatever it is. And I think that what happens is that we end up then feeling like is there's something wrong with me? I'm never gonna be happy anywhere. As opposed to knowing like this is just gonna be the way that it is anywhere. Now, it's not to say that it can't be a different set of 50 50, right? For me, when I was working as a lawyer, I had a lot of stress, a lot of frustration, a lot of boredom, a lot of unfulfillment.
I also felt very secure. I had like a really good salary. I felt successful. You know, my ego was doing real great 'cause people thought I was a success. That was kind of my 50 50 when I became an entrepreneur. I don't have the same security, right? So my 50 50 is like there's a lot of instability, there's a lot of insecurity around that. There was a lot of like fear of failing in front of people and fear of being judged. Like that was the negative emotion, the 50% I had to deal with. But on the other side, I was very fulfilled and I'm very excited about a lot of the work that I do and I feel super passionate about a lot of these things. And so again, it might be different. And it's not to say that you can't seek something that is more aligned with you.
I just want you to know that when you go, it's gonna be like that too. And I tell you that right now where you're at so that you can know, like I think a lot of times we think I'm missing out on something where I'm gonna go and it's gonna be a hundred percent wonderful and it's not. So maybe I can slow down. Like maybe the fact that I have to stay here is like, yeah, it sucks, but I'm gonna have to deal with 50 50 there anyways. So if I'm gonna like get a benefit here because I'm gonna network or I'm gonna make money or I'm gonna pay off debt or whatever it might be, maybe I can focus on like what's the 50 50 that's good here. What's the 50 50 that I can deal with? And I can know like yes, I can go for bigger and better things and I'm still gonna have to deal with some unwanted aspects of the next job.
There is no rush. Like even if it takes me another year here, there's no like utopia that I'm going to. The third thing that I want you to think about is the fact that there's a difference between short-term and long-term goals. I think for a lot of people we think there's just one goal. And so we get really antsy and frustrated when we can't act on that goal. So let's say my goal is to become a writer randomly. Let's say I'm gonna, I wanna become an author. In my mind I start like kind of focusing in on like, well, I'm not doing that right now. I'm at this job and every day that goes by in this job, I'm not working on becoming a writer, right? Or I'm not working on my craft, you know? And I look at other people on social media and I compare myself to other people that are publishing things and I get more and more upset.
But you really have to understand the difference between your short term and your long-term goals. And oftentimes your short-term goals are what are gonna set you up to be able to go after your long-term goals. It's like building a foundation. It's like brick by brick. You're building these goals and these dreams that you have and what a beautiful thing it is. But you have to know like what is the short term goal here that is setting me up, right? Maybe I'm not working as an author right now, but I am working at a job to pay off my debt so that I can be a writer without crushing student loans. Like I'm hooking my future self up with that, right? I am setting myself up so that I don't have to deal with this debt when I have a job as an author that may not be as stable, that could be my short term that's helping me get to the place I want to be, right?
Maybe it's that I need to network here and I need to get certain connections before I try to grow my own business, right? My short term goal, if I focus on like fine, then I'm going to knock this outta the park. I'm going to network my little booty off. I am going to make as many connections as I can because that is what I'm focused on here. And I don't have to keep berating myself or losing focus on the fact of like, well, I'm not building my business. The more I'm doing this, I'm not doing that. It's like, but this is building towards that. And so I want you to really think about like what is your short-term goal here? And how is that setting you up to go after bigger and better dreams later on? How does that fit into the plan? Because when you have that purpose behind why you're doing it, and it's not just simply like I'm just wasting my life away somewhere that I don't wanna be, it becomes easier to bear it.
It becomes easier to know the purpose behind what you're doing and make that a little bit more purposeful, for lack of a better word. Like make it that there's a reason that I am here and that reason will ultimately hook my future self up. And I'm excited about that. And the last thing that I want you to think about is this concept that your life is in seasons. We are not taught this in our society by any means. We are. The way that our hustle, culture and capitalism has sort of groomed us all to believe like programmed us is that we are robots and that we are gonna have the same level of output and we're gonna have the same level of productivity and we should be the same person year in and year out, season in, season out. We should always be able to do the same exact thing, which when you think about it consciously is absurd, right?
No human being works like that. Like there's obviously going to be times when you're sick or you didn't sleep at night, or you have young kids or you're taking care of your elderly parents, or you have a bad breakup or whatever it is where your emotions are in the way where you are physically maybe not able to work in the same way. That is not a weakness, that is literally life. And every single one of us is gonna go through it, has gone through it will go through it multiple times. And the more you start looking at your life in seasons, the easier it becomes to handle when you're in a particular season that may not be the most exciting or the one you wanna be in, right? You might be in a season right now where you have young kids and maybe it's not the time to go hard on your business.
Like maybe it is the time to like stay in a job that provides you healthcare and you know, is stable enough for you to be able to take care of your small children. Or maybe it is a season where you're going through depression and you don't have the capacity to build a business on the side. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. And I think that the more we start understanding like how long our lives are and how much time we have to live and work and that these seasons are gonna come and go, and it's just that it is a season. There will come a season where you can push hard, where maybe you don't have as much responsibility where you do have the capacity to do more. Great. Then when that season comes, then you can let yourself go full out. The problem in our society is that we try to go full out all the time for years and years and decades and decades, and then we wonder why we burn out and we wonder why we can't maintain it.
Because you were never meant to. It was never meant to be the way that your life was supposed to be. Just because we set that up in society doesn't mean that that's how it's supposed to be. And so I want you to really think about what is the season that you're in right now. Maybe this season is like we talked about with the short term goal, like setting yourself up for a later season. Maybe this is a season to take the foot off the gas and give yourself some breathing room and let yourself just be, maybe it's a season to take care of other important things like your family and your community and not your career. That's okay too. All of it's okay. And I think that when you know like you're running your own race, somebody else might be in a season where they're going hard and you're gonna see their business flourish and they're gonna put, you know everything they can and they're gonna press down on the gas, great.
That's their season. I guarantee you they're gonna get to a season where that's gonna stop. It's not a good or a bad thing, it just is what it is. And so when you can start putting the blinders on and really asking yourself like, what season am I in and how do I take care of myself in this season? How do I have compassion for myself and give myself grace and show up for myself and have my own back? Like this is the season and it will change. Promise you it'll change and I'll have more time and I will have more energy. You know, once I take care of whatever it is I need to take care of in this short term, I can have another period where it's go time and then how great is that? And then that season will end. And I feel like when you understand that concept, it becomes easier to not get into this all or nothing thinking of like, this is the end.
I'm just gonna be at this job forever. It's never gonna change. I'm never gonna be happy, I'm never gonna find anything like, which is not true. So you have to remind yourself of those four things. I think if you look for the thing that you do like at your job, if you focus on the 50 50 that is here and what is the good part, what is the bad? If you know your short-term goals versus your long-term goals and you look at your life as a seasons, it makes it so much more bearable to be where you're at to like let yourself exhale a little bit to let yourself understand that like everything doesn't have to change or be different right now, I'm telling you, it is available to you to be able to actually like where you are, even if you don't love the job. It's available to you to manage your own mind so that you're not constantly dreading it and hating your life. Even if this career is not it for you. You still don't have to hate the day to day. And if you want help with that, if you wanna learn how to manage your mind and manage your thoughts so that you're not dreading every day, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club, which is my membership. You can go to lessons from a quitter.com/quitterclub where we do this work, where you get the coaching, where you learn how to apply this stuff to your situation that you can actually not hate the majority of your day, every day during your waking hours and all of your adult life. And we can start figuring out the season you're in now and setting you up for that long-term goal when you change seasons later.
All right, my friends, I hope that this was helpful and I will see you next week for another episode.
