Fire Your Boss Read Free

history people didn’t look to derive emotional satisfaction from their jobs. Work was to put “bread on the table.” Emotional and spiritual satisfaction came from family, home, church, community, and hobbies. In the 1960s and 1970s, baby boomers rebelled against this approach. They perceived this division between financial and emotional motivations as dehumanizing. They criticized their “organization man” fathers as leading hollow lives in which they did meaningless work. In response, baby boomers created a new work concept: the career. This was a work path offering not just financial, but also emotional and spiritual, satisfaction. Boomers looked for work meaningful to them so they could lead more satisfying lives. The result, however, has been anything but.
    The search for work that offers both financial and psychological satisfaction has left most people with neither. Having made such a strong commitment to their work, people today are working longer and longer hours. Meanwhile, they are spending less and less time at home, with their family, in church, in their community, or pursuing their hobbies. And despite this incredible time commitment, their income isn’t secure. The pursuit of a “meaningful” career has backfired, leading baby boomers to envy the lifestyle of those gray-flannel-wearing fathers they used to criticize.
    The second step in my program to win the job of your dreams is to kill your career. It may sound counterintuitive, but the best route to emotional satisfaction is stop looking for it at work. Instead, look for a job that provides as large and secure an income as possible. Look for emotional satisfaction in your personal life. If at some point in your life your need for income is reduced, you can make concessions to achieve some kind of unified “career.” Until then, abandon the unhealthy notion of career and return to the far healthier concept of job.
    Sean Shanahan is a forty - five - year - old graphic designer who bears a striking resemblance to the English film star Ronald Colman and who likes dressing as if he’s off to a shooting weekend in the English countryside. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Sean studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating, Sean looked for work. He eschewed the advertising and publishing industries and instead looked for work with design firms. In the past two decades Sean has worked for four different design firms. He has continued to place a priority on pursuing interesting projects, despite frequently being offered “corporate” work that was better paying. Recently, Sean jumped to a start-up firm that specialized in Web design projects. But after a year the firm is still struggling. Sean is working nearly sixty hours a week. He lives alone and has little or no social life. Promised bonuses are yet to appear. Sean came in to see me to discuss rumors he has heard that one of the firm’s three main clients is about to go under. Meanwhile, he received a call about a job opening at a cable television network for someone to create logos for special news and entertainment programs. It would offer him a much higher income and he wouldn’t need to work as many hours. Still, he’s uncertain. “I don’t know if I want to be someone who creates graphics like ‘Homicide in the Heartland,’ ” he said to me. I told him I thought homicide made sense, and it was his career he should kill.
There’s No I in Job
    Most Americans have spent their lives believing there’s justice in the workplace. We’ve been led to believe that people who show up on time and do their jobs will be safe, as long as the company can afford to keep them on. We were taught that if you show up early, stay late, and do your job well, you’ll be rewarded for it, either through promotion or with pay increases. It’s an accepted belief that everyone, management and staff, has the company’s interests at heart, and, as a result, open and honest debate about how things