How to know when having a 9-5 isn’t right for you
Table of Contents Show
📌 Pin it!
In a service-based 9-5 industry, it’s easy to feel drained. It’s especially easy to be drained of patience & tolerance in a competitive market with low prices which attract all the worst clients.
So, how do you know if you’re just tired, stubborn, spoiled, privileged, or need a break? Versus ready for a career change?
It can be hard to tell, I know. We talk ourselves out of making “crazy” decisions, especially for risk-averse people, like myself.
This might seem random, but have you ever heard the “Serenity Prayer?”
Though I’m not particularly religious, as a lifelong perfectionist & recovering control freak (😂 –mostly kidding), I appreciate the concept & the intent as it relates to change.
Of course, originally the spirit behind it was surrender and acceptance because it’s something used frequently in sponsored groups for addicts attending anonymous substance abuse recovery programs.
The full “prayer” is longer, but what’s recited most frequently is the most interesting part for me:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Why the hell am I talking about this? 😄 Well, I’ve been reading again!
I’ve been reading Ash Ambirge’s book, The Middle Finger Project* and it’s making me relive the feelings around my decision to change from having a steady 9-5, to the somewhat unpredictable income of running my own business full time.
ℹ️ By the way, AWESOME book. Ash is hysterical AND motivating.
Go check it out!!*I literally have 3 copies of it (Audible, Kindle, and Hardback) myself.
If you feel trapped in your life, and know there has to be more, I hear you. I actually think most of us do, but we find relief in our hobbies & our free time and for some of us, that’s enough.
For others though, the change we need in order to find that same relief, is a lot bigger.
READ MORE: Why graphic designers are leaving their corporate jobs in droves
If your 9-5 has you feeling like Frank Costanza yelling, “SERENITY NOW!” then keep reading, because I feel you –and I’ve SO been there myself.
❶ You’re miserable for no reason, seemingly.
Positives: You have a steady paycheck. You might even have some vacation time & a relatively flexible schedule where time off for appointments is easy to get when needed. Maybe you even have a casual work environment working next to people you really like. You might even be in the same industry you went to college for!
Negatives: You might not get paid what you were expecting to make after 10 years in the industry. Maybe you don’t have insurance or benefits yet, and you’re struggling to pay off student loans. If you’re like me, you might also live in a region you hated, in weather/climate you abhorred, in a political environment where you were the voting minority in a growingly divisive world. The clients you work with tend to want the world for a penny, each project feels like death by a thousand papercuts (revisions) and you never get started on the right foot because the information you needed to do the job correctly was almost ALWAYS missing when you received the work order. Miscommunication was rampant. “Not my job” mentality was growing like a pandemic, and teamwork was dwindling. The work culture became toxic for your very spirit. You began to feel unappreciated, undervalued, and overworked, while nothing was ever good enough.
Been there? 😳
Yeah,.. me neither. 😉
Maybe it’s obvious, but I’m speaking from experience here.
I had a steady paycheck. My husband & I could comfortably pay all of our bills and had extra money in the bank, for the first time in our marriage. We were VERY slowly paying down our student loans. We both had great cars, a house, 2 fur babies… and yet?
We were BOTH utterly miserable most of the time.
My husband was working 60+ hours weekly, on average, trying to edit, maintain, and send to print 2 local weekly newspapers as Editor; also juggling horrific complaints, rampant racism in a small town, corruption in the local governments, negativity ALL around him, ZERO time off, constant deadlines, responsibilities were piling up to impossible heights, and stress was so bad that it eventually threw his health completely out of whack. He developed regular hives, stomach ulcers, started grinding his teeth in his sleep… all for crap wages with no benefits. On weekends, he was so utterly exhausted that all he could bring himself to do was lounge on the couch with the TV on for background noise to drown out the chaos in his head, stirred up by remembering he had to do X or Y by Monday morning... But, he was “Editor.” It sounded good, on paper.
Meanwhile,…
I only worked 40-50 hours a week, averaging 40-45 most of the time, but I also had all the chores to do around the house, a puppy to manage mostly by myself, and a side-hustle to run where clients were depending on me. At work, nothing was ever good enough or fast enough, on top of all the negatives I listed above.
We are trained from preschool to be employees, not CEOs.
As Ash says in her book,
“it’s been ingrained in our heads to follow the instructions since we were about four days old. …school is a twelve-year-long exercise in instruction following, a hearty warm-up for the next sixty years of your life as a productive member of society. It’s no coincidence that the school day is modeled after the workday. It’s also not an accident that kids learn how to take tests and check off boxes rather than think outside them.
In theory, having standards is a good thing. (At least, that’s what they told me as a teenage girl.) But in practice, “learning” has become confused with “job training.” As kids we’re reminded time and time again that the purpose of school is to prepare us for the real world, but “the real world” assumes a very narrow definition. Is it just about job preparation? What about life preparation? What about teaching our children how to be curious, engaged, wonder-filled individuals? And, most importantly, who gets to decide what’s worth knowing?”
No wonder I was miserable! From day one, I’ve been trained to be an employee when it turns out I’m a better CEO, but I never even knew that was an option until I stumbled into it by accident.
I had a niggling feeling that this wasn’t acceptable for me.
Unlike that prayer, I couldn’t accept these things as “just work” or “just life.” –And so help me God, the next person who told me “that’s just work” or “welcome to the real world” would get verbally punched in the face!
❷ You can’t accept that “this is it ”
That was my first big clue.
I’d vent to other people who were accepting and practically minded, and they’d look at me, confused, and say, “that’s just work” or, “you should be grateful for what you have,” or worse, “at least you get some vacation.”
I’d scoff at their comments, –though maybe not to their face, and think they were crazy if they thought this was okay. I thought I’d go crazy! How was everyone else not also trying to push these barriers down with me??? Why was it so hard for these people to understand that I wanted something MORE and that desire for “better” was what was okay? Not the instinct to stick with the safety net of the familiar, however much we hated it.
I was miserable building someone else’s dream, someone else’s way when I felt like my ideas could contribute positively, and yet no one was listening.
My 9-5 felt like a constant effort of pushing a boulder up Mt. Everest, except we’d never ever reach the top. We were always pushing uphill, never down.
After almost 9 years working in the same place, and about 14 in the corporate environment within my industry, I was tired of fighting to fix things, when people all around me didn’t want change.
For years I thought, “This can’t be it. Tell me this is not how the next 40+ years of my working, adult life will be like!”
I knew without a doubt that I couldn’t do “this” until I retired in 40 years, –that is, if I could ever retire at all!
In the US, our national retirement program is based on a small portion of each check paying into a centralized fund our entire adult lives, and payout for retirement starts in our early 60’s. Our payout is based on the highest annual earnings we’d collected in our adult working life and that meant if you only ever flip burgers for $7.25/hour, then in retirement, you’d get regular payouts based on those annual earnings. However, if at one point you were making six figures or more, your retirement would payout based on those earnings instead, because you paid more into the program, offering more per paycheck since your checks were higher.
Let’s just say, my retirement checks wouldn’t be from a six-figure income if I stayed complacent in any of my previous jobs.
I decided that the only way to change my future was to get up and make it happen myself. Figure it out. Research it. Make positive changes and TRY something new.
We all know the saying, right? ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.‘ I was finally ready to try something different if it’d mean different results, even if that change was scary.
At that point, I didn’t care if I failed at it anymore. I JUST HAD TO TRY.
❸ Listen to your gut; it’s trying to tell you something!
I’ll be the first to admit that for the first few years, I was hardcore struggling.
My college education didn’t teach me how to run a business, but I had some ideas about what mistakes to avoid, from sucky situations at all my past jobs.
To fix this, I took some courses to learn things I didn’t know. What money I made, I reinvested back into my business in the form of apps, tools or education.
The more I chipped away at what felt like a mountain to overcome, I began to feel at home in this entrepreneurial environment. The more I KNEW deep in my soul that this was what I was supposed to be doing. Some version of “this” and with these like-minded people who were also not cut out for a 9-5.
The more I heard someone tell me they were scared I’d fail or that “this” wouldn’t work out the way I expected (because they didn’t want me to get hurt), the more I felt I had to prove them wrong.
–And eventually, the more I knew I actually could.
My confidence built with every client I took. I learned from mistakes as I made them, I tweaked & tried again. Failing became a scientific process of analyzing each failure as a learning experience, changing what didn’t work and trying again with a new method to see what would.
You could say that I failed up! 😆
It didn’t happen in 3 months, or 6 months, or 12 months.
It took me 6 years to get here. I started my side-hustle in 2015, and I finally made the leap into full-time (terrifyingly) in 2020, mid-pandemic, –and only because I got furloughed because my boss knew I was burnt out (& that I freelanced on the side) and offered me a furlough as a break, hoping I’d come back, while also cutting his expenses since business had slowed down drastically because of Covid19.
For me? It was a f*cking miracle.
I’d get unemployment because of the furlough, time off to dive deep into making my business work, and begin to truly take charge of my life, –all while feeling much less afraid that we couldn’t pay bills in the interim.
This is when ya might hear, “everything happens for a reason” and I don’t disagree. I told the universe I was ready, and it cleared a path for me to take the leap.
READ MORE: How I launched the damn thing
DISCLAIMER: Of course I’m not recommending you put in your two-week’s notice today if you know you can’t pay your bills without your soul-sucking job. There’s a way to transition smartly and if you need help with that, here’s what I’d recommend:
Ready for change, but don’t know what to do next?
My friend Sasha Korobov has your back! Her podcast, EntrepreNotYet can help set you on the right path to leave that 9-5 and live the life that you know you’re meant to live.
Grab Ash Ambirge’s book! Did I mention I have THREE copies of this book, myself?! 😂 #seriouslythough
