The Importance of the Right Mindset
coaching, job satisfaction IN MY LIFE is an area where I find a remarkable degree of consistency: Most people aren’t happy in their jobs. That’s fascinating because it’s a divergence from how we feel when we start a new job. We go in with so much hope, such high expectations. So what happens?
Routine happens. Life happens. We discover our expectations were exaggerated. We settle into the humdrum. We start getting bored and frustrated. Pretty soon we’re checking our watch every hour, counting down the minutes until the workday is over. We’re stuck in the mundane. Again.
The mundane job is why many of us wake up on Monday morning with a sense of dread. We drag ourselves out of bed, hit the train or the highway for the commute with resignation. The idea of Monday through Friday becomes a source of anguish and disappointment.
Many of us are imprisoned by a shortsightedness that keeps us on the treadmill. I have a friend, an award-winning journalist, who told me an instructive story from the beginning of his career. While still in college at a prestigious Ivy League school, he was giddy when he got a summer internship at the newspaper he used to deliver as a boy in his medium-size hometown. On the first day he was enthusiastic and eager. At an orientation he met the other intern who would be working alongside him. He noticed right away she wasn’t happy to be there. He learned several of her friends had landed internships at The Wall Street Journal, while they had turned her down. She was bitter about WSJ’s rejection and disappointed she would be spending the summer at a smaller paper she considered beneath her.
Throughout the summer, she exuded an air of disgust with the place. The editors were offended by her obnoxious arrogance. At the same time, my friend worked hard to make a great impression, in the process getting several plum assignments and even a couple of front-page bylines. He also became close to the editor-in-chief.
When the summer was over, my friend and the other intern went their separate ways. Upon graduation, my friend got a new internship at a well-respected newspaper in a part of the country he had never been to. He did great work there, and when the six-month internship was over, the paper decided they wanted him to stay on staff. But they didn’t change his salary, continuing to pay him as an intern. My friend grew frustrated eating tuna fish for dinner every night because it was the only thing he could afford. He also didn’t like the city very much and longed to return home. One day on a whim he called the young editor-in-chief at his hometown newspaper. After a little small talk, my friend dropped the hint that he really wished he had a job that paid more money.
Within a few hours, this editor made several phone calls that resulted in my friend being flown back home and getting a job at one of the top newspapers in his home state. It was a huge win-win for him. And he carried that lesson with him for the next three decades, remembering how much benefit he got from applying himself in this internship.
It’s a powerful lesson demonstrating the value of having the right mindset in a situation that could be seen as mundane. When it comes to our jobs, our careers, our workplaces, we never know our future path. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure we don’t get derailed by letting the mundane turn into dangerous frustration.