The Job You Hate Is the Greatest Teacher of All

For some, working a job is a prison sentence(приговор).

I know what it’s like. I worked a job early in my career that felt like a prison sentence. My boss would fuck with me just for the hell of it(просто так).

A terrible job teaches you the best lessons you need to break free. Here are mine.

How do you react?

It’s not the job. It’s how you react to discovering you’ve taken the job from hell. You can get angry at your work colleagues. You can come home from work and be angry at your family. You can scream at the waiter who is a few minutes late with your frappuccino in the morning.

Your work circumstances(обстоятельсвта) don’t define you. Your reaction to them does.

What do you do after-hours?

After work is where the magic happens.

A job you hate can teach you to build something before and after work of your own. One exit plan can be your own business. Another exit plan is to supplement your next job with a second income to broaden(расширить) your options.

I wrote after hours while working a job I hated. I funneled the frustration of my job into my writing. I turned the lessons from my bad job into helpful stories to assist others to overcome similar challenges.

But it wasn’t a 30-day challenge that gifted me a Lambo. I worked after hours for several years. Sustained effort became the game-changer, not luck or random events.

Before work you can do the following:

• Read to change your view of the world.
• Publish on social media to crystallize your opinions and gain feedback.
• Exercise to improve your energy levels needed to fight the painful reality of a bad job.
• Eat better food to prevent brain fog that will cloud your judgment.

Your career can be drastically altered(кардинально поменятся) outside of work hours. The choices you make before and after work are vital. You can recover with Netflix. Or you can recover by improving your way to your next paid job.

How much can you really survive on?

One option is to quit. This thought will cross your mind.

I thought about quitting many times. I worked out how much money I needed to pay rent and eat. It turned out I could survive quite a while without having to become a male stripper(стриптизерша) nobody would pay to get a lap dance from.

A job you hate can lie to you. It can make you think you’re going to be broke.

But a job I hated taught me to be frugal(экономный). I saw every purchase(покупка), every takeaway lunch, every cup of coffee, every tank of petrol, every addiction requiring money, as more forced time working a shitty job. I took the money I saved and built a backup fund. The backup fund became the soft mattress I could land on if my boss kicked me out of the 10-story office building I work in, or if I decided to jump to escape.

Who do you gravitate towards?(К кому вы тяготеете ?)

I found positive people became a magnet. I wanted positivity because my job was full of negative people. This led me to attend live events. This led me to make new friends. This led me to join social media group chats with strangers. This led me to engage with other writers.

The more time I spent away from the people who were like my boss, the more time I started to see a world of new opportunities tailor-made(сделанные на заказ) for me. There are teachers all around you. Notice them. Speak with them so you can learn from them.

Gravitate towards people you want to be like, not terrible people who make you hate your job.

Who do you want to become as a result?

There are two paths: you can become the people who you work with in your bad job. Or you can become the person who refuses(отказывется) to never be like the people who made your job terrible. You need examples to follow. But what I needed was examples of exactly who not to follow.