Changing where I work

Complaining is easy, doing something significant to change your situation is often hard. And the reason that people don't make a significant change is because there's pain during that change. So for example, you're not happy in your job. You go to work, you get home from work, you complain to your housemate, your partner. Get it off your chest, run, feels good, have dinner, go to bed, get up the next day. You're on this conveyor belt, you keep doing it. Stop doing that to do something different. For a start, if you want to do something in the same field, you would have to start job hunting. And we all know how typically soul destroying that can be.

If we want to do something in a different field - if we're not finding our vocation is really satisfying us - you have to start from scratch. You have to learn something new. You have to put yourself out there. There's imposter syndrome. People who have been doing it for years better than you. You're going to take a pay cut: all these things that are really, really difficult to get you to the point you want to be. And so it's those things I think why a lot of people [hold off] - and it makes sense: doing those things is really hard. So the framework that I choose to make big decisions like that is to forget any short term pain and lean into it. You have to put yourself through a difficult situation to get to a better place and not think about this is going to be really awkward for a few months.

I always work towards making myself redundant. I always work towards getting to a place where I've achieved, what I wanted to achieve in that company that operationally the company can absolutely survive without me, that strategically all the initiatives are either ticked off or well on the way. And there are clear owners of those initiatives.

And I start to feel either one or two things or both things. One is that I'm not using my expertise and therefore I'm starting to feel that I'm redundant. And the other one is I'm not learning. I don't have brand new difficult problems to dig deep into.

There's overhead to changing roles. It's hard. It's hard to find a job. It's hard to go for an interview, especially when you're speaking to multiple companies at the same time. Then you've got to go through all of the onboarding, proving yourself again.

It could be a year or maybe even two to go through that whole process until you're feeling happy and content again. You've got to really want to do it. And when I was earlier in my career, the overhead was worth it. I was changing often, but I was having huge learning opportunities every time I changed.

I think some people are extremely cautious when looking for a role because they feel that they're in it forever, and it has to be the right thing there. But from contracting and from roles where I've walked away, I think you just have to be honest with yourself and go, "If it doesn't work out, a future employer would rather know that you tried it and it wasn't a good fit, and walked away after three months, rather than three years, when you just didn't really enjoy what you were doing and you weren't giving your all."

Until now I've never sit in the same position for a year. My maximum time in a company was 11 months. So that point about always changing jobs and always looking what's there, it really hit me because that's what I did. When I moved to London, I was like... Every time I was looking for a new challenge. I was looking for working with smarter and smarter people. And I was looking to learn as many things as I can. And as soon as you start getting comfortable, you start looking outside for something more.