On Working

Have you ever been stressed out in your job? Ever come home unable to shake a feeling of failure, or uncompleteness? Ever worked late at night on something that didn’t end up being important, or dreaded waking up in the morning and heading in to work? Ever wondered why these feelings keep recurring, even if you move or even change careers?

I tend to feel this way fairly frequently about my job, and I always assumed reasons like these:

1) I’m a perfectionist, so that’s why I’m not “happy” in my job.
2) My boss is ___insert bad/annoying quality here___, so these feelings are their fault.
3) I have so much work to do, I’ll never possibly finish it or catch up.
4) I’m in a high-stress profession, with lots of money at stake, in a big city. This is just how its supposed to be.
5) I don’t make enough money. If I made more money, then I wouldn’t feel this way.

Turns out, pretty much none of those are true, but it took powering through the 20 chapters of this book to figure that out.

It’s difficult to summarize this wide-ranging book, but I can say that, as you might expect, part of the reason for bad feelings about work has to do with you and your attitude, and part of the reason comes from “the system.” There are some really simple things you can do to literally transform your working life into something good for you and good for your line of work also. If you struggle with these things, you simply must read this book.