Have you ever found yourself asking: why am I working so damn hard?
This question may have arisen during a particularly knotty late-night study session, or in the midst of a toxic relationship gone on too long, or when practicing a move or musical sequence for the fifteen-hundredth time. Whatever the situation, when that doubt strikes, it shatters the jar that was holding your whole life together. The easy option is to pretend you never asked and carry on as you were, held together by blurry vision and short memory. The harder, and (temporarily) much more destructive option, is to go all the way down the rabbit hole until you find an answer that either allows you to carry on as you were with newfound conviction, or sets you on a path more in line with what your soul demands.
Ask anyone starting their career why they work and the answer is straightforward: they work for the pay. Ideally, their job will also provide challenge, impact, and a community, but the primary reason most people work is to pay off debt, pay the bills, fund their lives, and become financially stable. It’s a clear transaction: you exchange time and effort for money, which buys security and freedom. Often, before even entering the workforce, the promise of future financial independence is what drives hard work at school or university or sports or arts. The foundational idea is that hard work leads to success, success leads to wealth, wealth guarantees security freedom.
But to be successful in any organisation, time and effort alone are not enough. You have to play by its rules. This applies to everyone, from blue-collar workers to white-collar knowledge workers. Even disruptive entrepreneurs who transform industries have to play by the laws of economics: they have to make a product that generates demand and continually innovate to outcompete challengers. Success requires you to spend more and more of your time doing things not for your enjoyment, but because you have to. Making calls, sending emails, producing reports, networking, reading the latest business news, following up on up-and-coming entrepreneurs, attending team events, thinking commercially. Repeat these tasks enough, and they become a big part of what you are to the world. Hence, the third cost in the transaction is conformity. We end up with:
time + effort + conformity = money
money = security + freedom.
That freedom doesn’t come immediately; it’s a deferred reward. A lifelong exercise in delayed gratification. But is there a cost of sacrificing some freedom now for more freedom later?
It starts early in life. While completing your studies, you strategically choose which internships you pursue. The undergraduate degree itself was carefully selected to maximise your employment prospects, the university too. Earlier still, in high school, you chose subjects which would open doors to top universities. As far back as primary school you were told to work on your math skills because of how important they would be later on. Your parents might even have been strategic in their selection of extracurricular activities to bolster your CV before you even knew what that was. It could even have started before you left the womb; have you heard that fetuses that listen to Mozart in-utero are more likely to become CEOs?
When you’re a child or an adolescent, it feels obvious what you’re doing for your own enjoyment and what you’re doing because you’re supposed to. When you’re taking your first steps into adulthood, you still feel a clear line between the “real you” and the one that’s optimising for success. Speaking for myself, I retained that conviction heading into my first job, even though that job required I wear a suit and tie every day, something I had promised myself I would never do. A small concession, I told myself. Purely aesthetic.
The things we’re supposed to do are not always void of enjoyment. It can feel good to find a great candidate, satisfy a customer, put together a good presentation, to be recognised through a promotion and to feel valued through higher pay. Over time, your emails become crisp, your confidence in meetings grows, your pride in your work expands, and those things you were doing because you were supposed to become a bigger and bigger part of who you are. I stopped minding wearing the suit. In fact, I grew to like it. It looked good on me, and I looked good in it. I even bought a nice overcoat for the colder weather, and that wasn’t mandated by the dress code. A few short years later, it felt strange not to wear a shirt to work.
As you become older, the question of what you do for work comes increasingly earlier in conversations. It becomes a way people understand you, a principal way people come to think of who you are. That’s my friend Paul, he’s a Doctor. Have you met the neighbour Lisa? She’s in Finance. Your cousin is no longer your cousin, she’s a lawyer. And you? Who are you?
For a long time, my job was to find candidates for executive roles. An interesting but repetitive process. My output and performance were increasingly measured by the volume and quality of the candidates I could generate. Locked in my bedroom, working remotely during COVID, I started to feel like a robot whose inputs were roles and whose outputs were candidates. Every day I sent emails, took calls, interviewed candidates, took notes, wrote reports, sent more emails, sharpened my pitch to candidates, searched for new, better candidates, sent even more emails, took more calls, wrote more reports, took better notes, wrote more impactful reports, and on and on and on. After work, I rotted on the couch or in my bed passively watching TV. During those days, the sum total of my existence was limited to the finding, assessing and presenting of candidates. I confided in a mentor of mine, telling her I felt like a candidate generation machine. She put it bluntly: “That’s what you are”. Who was I? I wasn’t Tom; I was a candidate generation machine.
How did I get from the guy who said he’d never change for a job to someone who was entirely consumed by it?
It was the incentives. Economic and environmental incentives to think, behave and act in a certain way. Economic incentives in the form of pay: a salary in the immediate term, the potential for performance-based annual bonuses in the medium term, and the promise of a lifetime of seven-figure earnings if I made it to Partner. Environmental incentives in the way people inside the company respected, praised and lauded successful Partners. To become a Partner was to become part of the elite crew of cool (and rich) kids. These forces were so powerful that, even after quitting, it took me over a year outside of the industry to remember that I never wanted to become a Partner in Executive Search. For most of my life I didn’t even know what Executive Search was. It’s really not that important to me - to the “real me” at least.
But hey, it wasn’t all bad. A lot of it was interesting, I learned a lot, and I earned enough to later have the freedom to quit. Looking back, I would do it all over again. And sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I had gone all the way. What would it be like to be successful? When you reach that pinnacle you set out for all those decades ago, and you now have the financial freedom to be and do what you want to?
From speaking to countless executives and business leaders who did reach that point, here’s what I know. You won’t be unhappy, you will be proud of what you’ve achieved, you will feel the safety and freedom that comes with the earnings. It’s not a bad place to be. But these people’s satisfaction with their lives reveals something about the transaction they made.
What you do on a daily basis not only defines how others perceive you, it defines how you perceive yourself. Beyond perceptions, your work determines your impact on the world and society surrounding you. It alters your worldview and the way you move within it. Externally and internally, what you do comes to define you. Your work profoundly shapes who you are.
In other words: you are what you do.
If I had gone all the way and become a Partner, I wouldn’t wake up one morning and quit my job to follow my “true passion” (if I even knew what that was). Being a Partner would have become my passion. Exchanging work for the prospect of future wealth and freedom means not just sacrificing time and effort. It means accepting to become something different. It means allowing whoever promises you wealth to shape what you do, and therefore to shape who you are.
Acquiescence doesn’t just defer your freedom, it changes what you would do with it.
If you’re planning a career of hard work with the ultimate goal being freedom through financial gains, be aware of this trade-off. Whoever promises you wealth promises also to shape you.
You want to be free. You are now. If you wait, you might not be.
Really enjoyed this read! Equal parts thought provoking and insightful 😊