Ask Yourself: Why do I hate my job?

I’m lucky to be a Community Manager. It affords me with a wealth of opportunities to connect with motivated, interesting people. About a month ago it provided me with an opportunity to connect with Shane Mac—driven entrepreneur, unstoppable content creator and all around righteous dude.

It’s hard not to be inspired by someone like Shane because he has a new idea to share with me every time we chat. I really liked his idea for Ask Summit and was happy that he asked me to be a part of it. I’ll let Shane and his partner in crime, Andrew Swenson, explain what Ask Summit actually is, but I wanted to share my interview for the project. I answered the question: What do you say to people who tell you that they hate their job.

What really bugs me about people who say that they hate their job is that they take no accountability for making their situation any better. You gotta take charge of your own destiny to make things happen. I talk about this below with Shane …

What do you say when people tell you that they hate their jobs? Any sympathy for their strife? Let me know what you think …

I’ve never had a mentor, and that’s okay

Penelope Trunk told me that she couldn’t be my mentor. “You’re too difficult,” was what she said. At the time I didn’t care because I thought that I hated her. Emotions run high in early-stage start ups. Ours was no exception.

Over time I realized that I didn’t really hate Penelope. What I really hated was my lack of confidence when becoming self employed. Once I figured that out, we became friends.

A friend. Not a mentor. I have learned plenty about myself just from being around her, but I don’t want to be like her. I have a lot of people like this in my life.

Trial and error is my mantra. I’ve always learned things the hard way. It makes sense that I would ally myself with people I don’t typically agree with. Things are more interesting that way, and you learn more too.

When is the last time that you learned anything about yourself without conflict? The biggest lesson that I learned in 2009 was to push back when people are expecting too much out of me. I learned to set expectations for people, and if they didn’t like it, tough luck. I didn’t learn how to do this through someone I wanted to be like, I learned it through people who are nothing like me at all.

In essence, the big epiphany moments, the light bulbs, every “a-ha” was something that I came to when I stepped closer towards people I didn’t want to be like and further from people who made me feel comfortable. Chaos has been my muse, and so far she’s treated me quite well.

Life would be boring without the people that make us tick. They force us to think in different ways because we want to debate their ideas. Some days we win, others we lose. In the end, we all learn something.

I’ve never had a mentor in the traditional sense, and I think that maybe I don’t need one. I’m not the type of person who needs people to hold in high regard. I just need people who push me. And usually the best person to do that is someone who is not very much like me at all.

On thinking that I’m going deaf, and confrontation

I almost always cut the first paragraph out of each blog post. I do this because my first paragraph rarely accomplishes anything other than self absorption. Writer’s masturbation, if you will.

I’m telling you this because you might spend a lot of time beating around the bush, too. Sometimes we end up hurting ourselves when we indulge in such tomfoolery.

I spent two days in Tulum, Mexico convinced that I was going deaf. I went diving through a bunch of reefs and caves. I was convinced that all the pressure changes knocked something loose. It’s stupid, but these are the kinds of neurotic thoughts I’ll do back flips over on a daily basis.

It took me two days of blue funk to pony up and go to a Mexican doctor. I barely understood his broken English, but he squirted a syringe of what looked like club soda into my ear, then ten minutes later pulled out a ball of wax. He showed me the dime-sized wad before tossing it down the drain and writing me a bill for 1,299 pesos.

The money didn’t matter. The time I spent worrying about the outcome cost me two days of vacation, and that did matter. I could have been sipping tequila on the Riviera Maya—not a care in the world—but I spent two days comatose from my own angst instead.

I want to learn to be better at confronting things early. I want to axe out the stage of fear where I let hours decay while I think about ungodly outcomes. I think if we all learned to do that a little better, we’d be a lot happier with our lives.

Sure, it’s quite possible that you’re the ass-kicking lord of confrontation—by god you better be blogging and sharing some of that wealth—but I’m not. And if you’re anything like me, please raise your glasses, then go schedule some time to reflect on the things you’ve been brooding over for way too long.

Like maybe there’s tension at work and you’ve been avoiding butting heads because it’s unnerving. Confront that.

Or maybe you just haven’t been blogging because you’re afraid that what you say will suck. Confront that, too.

Whatever it is that’s holding you back from living life, unabridged, confront that shit and move on. Once you’re done, you’ll feel stupid for not doing it sooner, but relieved that you finally did.

A lesson in being stuck, and getting unstuck

When I adopted Charlie, it fit. I’m the type of person who likes having someone to take care of, and when I was working from home I felt less lonely. I had always loved having dogs, and this was going to be the first dog that was all mine. Up until last weekend when I finally gave Charlie away, we were always able to adapt to the changes we had to face together.

When Brazen Careerist moved out of my apartment and into a real office things changed, but we were able to adapt. When the business started getting more demanding, we were able to adapt too. Even when we moved into a 900 square foot apartment with my girlfriend, who initially didn’t like dogs, we adapted.

The change that pushed me over the edge was that I felt stuck. Even worse, I felt as if the dog was stuck too. He showed me that he felt stuck by pulling used coffee filters out of the garbage, tossing the grinds all over the carpet or by opening the refrigerator and eating multiple sticks of butter and then vomiting.

Meanwhile, I showed him I was stuck by spending money. Three-hundred dollars a month on average to be exact. That’s chump change compared to what parents spend on daycare for their kids, but for a twenty-something making startup money, doggie daycare is a bitch.

Pun, definitely intended.

When Charlie first came into my life I wrote a post where I said, “you couldn’t take my dog away from me with an army behind you.” I really believed that, and I can honestly say that I tried everything to make it work.

Giving Charlie up was easily one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. There are days when I regret the decision. There are even days where I look down by my fireplace and wonder why he’s not there. But I really have to believe that letting him get unstuck was the right thing to do. Hopefully, it will help me get unstuck too.

One of the most important things I’ve learned from being in a startup is to not let yourself get stuck. When people get stuck, businesses fail. Give it the proverbial “college try” of course, but if it doesn’t work, move on.

Such is the same in other aspects of our life.

I was thinking that at the end of the post I might tell you to not get a dog if your life is unstable, like mine. But I don’t really think that’s right. In fact, a dog might be exactly what you need.

When I got Charlie, I was lost in a lot of different ways. I was in a new city. I had been struggling to find meaningful relationships with people. I wasn’t even sure if Brazen Careerist was going to work. Then I adopted a 2-month-old chocolate lab puppy. He didn’t fix any of my problems, but he reminded me to take joy in the more simple pleasures of life—something that I had forgotten.

So who am I to say that having a dog isn’t right for you? During the two years that I spent with my own dog, I’ve experienced so much joy. And even though after two years of fetching, chasing and cleaning up poop our relationship no longer made sense, I wouldn’t trade the time I had with Charlie for anything.

Getting my act together in 2010, I’ll be blogging here again

I want to tell you about my New Year’s resolution. I know a lot of you hate the idea of resolutions, but honestly I don’t understand why. It’s all about rebirth. That’s what the Babylonians thought when they first came up with it. And who are we to question the Babylonians?

In 2010, I’m going to write more. I wrote a lot in 2009 actually, but most of it was marketing copy for Brazen Careerist. In 2010 I’m going to take things back to a more personal place.

I’ve gone through a lot of changes in the past year, and there’s a lot that you don’t know. For instance, I spent the last year trying to train a dog who knows how to open a refrigerator door. I failed miserably, and a week ago I had to give him away.

I also moved in with my girlfriend, who I’m incredibly in love with. The only problem is that we live in Wisconsin, in a 900 square foot apartment with 1,500 books (mine and hers).

Oh yeah. I spent two days in Mexico convinced that I was going deaf. I went to a Mexican doctor and he pulled a dime-sized ball of wax from my ear. I was fine, and it reminded me to stop being so neurotic.

Those are just a few things that I’m likely to write about.

I thought it would complement all these changes quite nicely if I changed my blog design too (thanks Zerflin). Even though blogging isn’t anything new to me, I hope that the experience I have this time around is as fresh and as fun as the great new look my buddy Benjamin has given to the site.

My goal is to keep writing and keep posting, even when I suck. And hopefully some of it will make you laugh. That’s one of my goals, too.

So here it goes. I’m back in the Blog-O-Sphere.