My early office in Prague was a little stone storage closet.
It was cold enough that I worked in a beanie and fingerless gloves.
That was the glamorous online-business lifestyle.
Not a beautiful coworking space. Not a penthouse. A desk shoved into a room that wasn’t really meant to be an office.
The business was getting somewhere, though.
I look back at that little room a lot more fondly than you might expect, because it’s a symbol of where I started.
These days I have a nice office with beautiful light and a standing desk. My golf clubs are in there. My dog hangs out with me. I can walk out onto a patio with a garden. I’ve got everything. That closet is just a cool reminder of where I came from.
As you move up in your career, you’ll look back and find the same thing. Everybody has their own version of that little storage closet.
The question is whether you’re on track for the office of your dreams…
A lot of people stay in a dead-end job for years and never get where they want to be in life, because they got comfortable. Sometimes you have to do uncomfortable things. And that Prague office was pretty damn uncomfortable, even if I look back on it fondly.
I’ve been on the other side of that too.
My last career job was at a government think tank, and I simply wanted to die. You can probably imagine how that sounds. We ran stupid studies like “Why was corn production in Iowa down 0.1% this year, and did global warming or diversity in Baltimore have anything to do with it?”
Just absolutely silly shit. A complete waste of taxpayer dollars.
Everybody there was waiting to die, literally. Everyone on my team said the same thing: “I’m just here to get my pension. I’m just waiting out the next few years.”
And I’m thinking, you guys are all literally just…dying here.
It was the saddest thing in the world. It was their own version of that closet. Cold, beanie on, wearing gloves. A little prison they’d put themselves in and locked the door on.
The way out is to decide where you want to be in life, map it out, and then look at the inputs you need to actually get there.
Say you want to make $250,000 a year. Honestly, that’s pretty much what you should want now, since it’s the equivalent of $100,000 back when my parents were working. So you work backwards.
When do you want to be making that much?
How?
What kind of life do you want to live? What car do you want to drive? Do you want to fly business class?
Break it all down, then figure out the inputs that get you there. Sometimes it’s job hopping. Sometimes it’s promotions. Eventually you get all the way down to “What job do I actually need, right now, to live the life I want?”
It’s not terribly difficult. Most people still never take the time to do it.
That’s exactly what we do at Unfair Careers.
We don’t just say, “Let’s get you a job.”
We figure out where you want to be in 10 years, so you don’t waste the next decade of your life trolling around.
Maybe it’s a simple tweak to your resume that gets you significantly more views. Maybe it’s helping you apply for jobs and working out the daily inputs that get you the outcome you deserve. Either way, you decide what you want, and we help you break it down.
There are only a few CV and LinkedIn rewrite slots left this month.
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