Hey! Nice to meet you. So, what do you do?
It's the first thing strangers ask you when they meet you: "What do you do?" It's almost like our job title should be in our name. But guess what? You are more than your job, and your job does not define you. It should be the last thing that defines you.
I don’t know if you need to hear that, but I wish I heard it a few years earlier than I did.
A lot of us define ourselves by our jobs, unsurprisingly—even more so if it’s a job you love and are passionate about. After all, it’s what we do for a third of our day, every single weekday, if not more.
But it’s easy to be consumed by a job you love. What tends to happen is that you slowly become loyal to the company, work longer hours, and go beyond the call of duty (and beyond your salary). This relationship tends to be one-sided, in which your company isn’t loyal back to you and won’t go beyond the call of duty for you. But in your head, it’s all okay, because you love your job!
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with loving your job. If you’re genuinely happy and your company is treating you well, then that’s a good deal. But you need to draw a line somewhere in case things ever go south, which they easily can.
In a previous role, I loved what I did, and I loved telling people what I did. It was my passion. It was, without a doubt, my dream job.
But as time went on, things got more and more stressful. More work piled on. More pressure added. And I was making 30-40% below the industry average salary on the low end. I wasn’t getting the support I needed, and I didn’t feel heard or valued by the right people.
But I loved my job, my team, and the work I was doing, so it was all okay, right?
Well, no. Stuff like that is never okay, and I had to learn how to walk away from it, which was hard to do. I still miss the work I did and the team I worked with, but it was the right move.
I left an industry I was passionate about to work somewhere new. Am I passionate about it? No, but I still want to do kick-ass work, and I take pride in that. It’s what motivates me. And it’s a lot easier to do great work when I feel supported, heard, and valued. I love my team, and my manager is awesome. That’s what counts.
I guess that’s my whole point: Just because you aren’t passionate about your job or the industry you work in, doesn’t mean it can’t be a dream job. I used to think that if I wasn’t passionate about what I did, then I wouldn’t enjoy it.
But the work itself has no bearing on whether a job is a dream job or not. It’s about your team, your manager, and whether or not you feel valued and supported. That’s what a dream job should be about.
Overtime
Other work-related stuff I want to talk about without dedicating an entire newsletter to it.
I've recently been thinking about job targets, KPIs, whatever you want to call them. Things like boxes packed, packages delivered, widgets assembled, etc. on a per hour or per day rate. I think it's important that companies have these, but oftentimes they run amok. There's always a push for higher and higher job targets, because companies need to make more money to keep shareholders rich and happy. I don't have anything else to say about it other than it's one of the worst things about our society and the capitalist system as a whole.
Happy Hour
Fun things I’m doing, TV shows and movies I’m watching, games I’m playing, music I’m listening to, and other neat stuff I want to share.
AI-generated art is all the rage now, and you might have toyed with a web version of DALL-E to generate some basic art. I've been playing around with something similar called stable diffusion, which generates some incredibly realistic and detailed images. It can run on local hardware too, rather than through the cloud. For example, I "created" this aerial shot of a stadium and city skyline by just giving the software some text prompts:
I could have improved on this with some better text prompts, because you'll notice some weird things the closer you look. (It has a hard time, apparently, drawing an accurate baseball field.) But it's impressive, nonetheless.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in two weeks. In the meantime, catch up on some older newsletter issues if you’re a new subscriber, and feel free to follow me on Instagram for my off-hours shenanigans.
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