'YOU'RE REALLY BRAVE'

ARE SELF-HELP BOOKS THE SECRET TO SUCCESS AT WORK?* CAREER CHANGER ALEX HOLDER HUNTS FOR THE PERFECT JOB *OR ARE THEY LIKE BEING STUCK AT AN ‘AWAY DAY’ WITH DAVID BRENT?

THIS IS A SENTENCE I’VE HEARD MANY TIMES RECENTLY. A few months ago, I quit my job as Creative Director at an advertising agency and left behind the 12-year career that went with it. I’d spent my adult life trying to get that job, and then suddenly found I didn’t really want it after all.

Every time someone tells me I’ve been brave, I feel they really want to use the word ‘stupid’. ‘That was a really brave (slash stupid) thing to do.’ They have a point: the job was actually great. I got to be creative, I worked with smart people, there was an office dog and I could tell myself I was terribly important. But it was making me unhappy every single day. The Ancient Greeks had a concept called eudaimonia, which meant happiness and fulfilment. ‘Human flourishing’ is said to be the most accurate translation, and I guess I wasn’t flourishing. I was unproductive, mean to my boyfriend and the only thing flourishing was the list of reasons I hated my life.

So one day, I quit. Just like that. You say the words and you can’t go back. The relief was incredible. I felt brave. I felt stupid. I felt liberated. I was no longer terribly important, no longer ‘busy’ and no longer had a place to go every day.

I quit to be happy, which isn’t something you can just tick off a to-do list. I am well aware how entitled this quest for fulfilment sounds, but I’m not the only one unhappy at work. A study by the London School of Business and Finance found that 47% of professionals in the UK want to change their job**. That figure jumped to 66% among millennials. If we believe psychologist and social commentator Jean M Twenge, author of Generation Me, an examination of the generation born between the Seventies and the Nineties, the traits of millennials are ‘narcissism, entitlement, confidence and laziness’. We want more. We want it now. We want it our way. But how do I find this elusive career, one where I don’t hate my life and can pay the bills? The one I jacked in a good job for? I picked up three new business self-help books to find out.