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This is a guest post by, Jason Feifer, Editor in Chief at Entrepreneur Magazine. Make sure to subscribe to his One Thing Better Newsletter.
Here’s Jason!
Are you ready for a change?
Statistically speaking, you probably are. Only 23% of workers are “engaged” at work, meaning that they find their work meaningful and feel connected to their colleagues — and that’s a “record high,” according to Gallup’s annual State of the Workplace report. Consider it: Less than a quarter of workers are truly happy, and that’s when things are going well.
So, why aren’t you making that change? My guess: You don’t know how to answer two important questions.
First: “What comes next?”
Second: “Am I giving up everything I’d done before?”
That second question is especially hard, because it feels invalidating. Change often feels like loss — as if we’re discarding everything we’re comfortable and familiar with, in exchange for an unknown set of burdens ahead.
But that’s not true. As editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, I get to study how people become adaptable and thrive in changing environments (and I write a weekly newsletter to help people do it). And I’ve discovered this: There is an important difference between leaving something and building upon something.
In this post, I’ll show you that difference — and help empower you to take your next, necessary step.
A better way to understanding quitting
Why do we stay in jobs that don’t fulfill us, or relationships that no longer sustains us? Economists might say it’s the sunk cost fallacy, which is a fancy way of describing this human impulse: We believe it’s worth continuing to do something, because we’ve already invested in doing it.
But the costs of chasing sunk costs is high? I once interviewed decision-making expert Annie Duke, who put it like this: “If you’re stuck in something that isn’t worth pursuing, you’re not allowing yourself the other opportunities that you might also pursue.”
Now let’s apply that thinking to a friend of mine we’ll call “Eric.” He once was part of the 23% of engaged workers in the world, and he still takes a lot of pride in his work. But his company has changed significantly. He hates his boss and feels beaten down by the company culture.
Could he just go to another company? Maybe, but not easily. He’s a magazine editor, where the job pool is shrinking. That’s especially true at his senior level.
“What if you left media?” I asked him.
“I don’t know how to do anything else,” he said. “I’d have to learn something new and work my way up.”
And there it is — the fear of starting over. I wanted to show him that he’s wrong.
So I ran him through an exercise that you may find helpful too.
What are your core skillsets?
In this exercise, we’re going to identify the tasks you perform every day — and then identify the underlying skillsets that drive those tasks. The purpose is to identify a kind of continuum: We want to see how the things you do today can translate into seemingly unrelated work tomorrow.
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First, list out your daily tasks. When I asked Eric to do this, he told me that he writes, edits, and manages other writers.
Next, think about the underlying skills that enable you to do those tasks. When I asked Eric, he just parroted the tasks back to me: “Well, I can write, edit, and manage people…”
You might be tempted to think that way too. But that’s exactly the problem we’re trying to unpack! Your tasks are not skills. Your tasks are expressions of skills. Consider: What singular skill do you have, that enables you to succeed at all of your tasks?
Eric spent a while thinking about this, and then offered a great answer: He knows how to take complex things and communicate them in simple ways. That’s what he does as a writer, and that’s what he helps other writers do as an editor and manager.
That’s a perfect answer, because it opens up infinite new avenues for him to explore. When he just thinks of himself as a “magazine editor,” his options are very narrow. But when he thinks of himself as “someone who can take complex things and communicate them in simple ways,” his options expand. We started brainstorming new directions — in advertising, communications consulting, branding, and so on.
“This gives me a totally different way to think,” he said. And that is the point.
What comes next for you.
At the start, I asked why you’re not making a change. And I took a guess. I said it’s because you don’t know how to answer two important questions: “What comes next?” and “Am I giving up everything I’d done before?”
The second question often inhibits the first. If you’re afraid of starting over, you’ll never consider what comes next. But Eric had now put that second question to rest — because he understood the answer.
The answer is no: You are not giving up everything you’d done before. You are building on top of it all.
You are good at something. I am good at something. Eric is good at something. Throughout the course of our careers and lives, we refined that talent. We tested it against the real world; we built a body of knowledge around it. And all that stays with us. It comes with us. No matter where we go.
If Eric took a job in advertising, he’d easily call upon his media background. He’d know how to take a complex idea and turn it into something engaging and digestible. He’d think: Oh, wow, the lesson I learned from editing that old story gives me a great idea for how to solve this new problem today!
This is the difference between leaving something and building upon something.
To “leave something” is to start over — which is not actually what happens when you leave something. Instead, you take what you had before, and then build on top of it, or utilize the old thing in a way that makes you excellent at the new thing.
You face new challenges, and you find new purpose in your old skills. You discover the instincts you didn’t know you had. You are prepared in ways you do not know.
And to be clear: You do not need to make a massive change to make this useful. Maybe your career or relationship is mostly good, but one part of it is not. Maybe you’re afraid of throwing out the whole thing, which is stopping you from identifying the part that’s broken and solving for just that. And when you make this change — or any change! — you are not starting from scratch either.
You’re saying: Here’s what I have, and here’s what I need, and here’s what I’ve learned that can help me get it.
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If you’re a Chief Human Resources or Chief People Officer, then you can request to join a brand new community I put together called Future Of Work Leaders which focuses on the future of work and employee experience. Join leaders from Tractor Supply, Johnson & Johnson, Lego, Dow, Northrop Grumman and many others. We come together virtually each month and once a year in-person to tackle big themes that go beyond traditional HR.
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