This material reflects my opinions and not those of my employers.
During my career I noticed a few influential aspects that impacted my satisfaction, and how they related to vertical growth. Understanding how satisfaction intertwines with growth and external influences took me time.
For this post I will focus on three tangible and intangible metrics and how they work together: external expectations, vertical growth and job satisfaction. I argue that our ultimate goal is to be satisfied with what we do, and the other two can impact our primary goal either as an enabler or as a drag.
If your answer is a resounding yes to the title question of this post, you already cracked the code. Otherwise, read on or listen on and I will give you some tools to fix that. You have to be satisfied with what you do. It must be non-negotiable. Will you always be? No. Should you accept that and keep on grinding? No.
While satisfaction and expectations are not necessarily exact metrics, you can easily determine where you stand with a gut check. Vertical growth is more clear. If you were to draw a curve over the past several years for each of these aspects, what would that tell you?
As an exercise, take the last 5 to 10 years and rate each of the three metrics from 1 (low) to 10 (high) using the tool below and observe the plotted result. To help with the criteria ask these questions as you think of each category:
Vertical growth: Have I been promoted to a level higher in that year?
External expectations: Did I feel that growth was important to show to family, friends, coworkers that year?
Satisfaction: Did I wake up energized most of the time to go to work that year?
What do you see? Is there a direct or inverse correlation between growth and expectations to your satisfaction? Note that this plot does not include a metric for whether you like what you do, because you don’t need a chart to tell you that if you don’t like what you do you need to make a change.
Now that you have some data points and can visualize your situation I can offer some suggestions about how to deal with the two aspects we are evaluating and how you can manage them to increase your satisfaction.
As you grew, how did your satisfaction change?
I mentored many people and a common question was: how do I get to the next level? My typical, say Socratic approach, is to probe with: why do you want to get to the next level? Is it power, money, impress someone who has expectations about you, do good, fix what the upper level is not doing right, something else? There is no right or wrong answer but what I can say is that if your satisfaction continues to decrease as you grow you may be pursuing growth for the wrong reasons. Understand why your growth motives are not working and take actions to refine your why and align with what brings you satisfaction, or accept that growth alone is not what makes you satisfied.
Did external expectations play a main role in your drive to grow?
Many times people really don’t have a good answer to their growth drive. I have seen that those who pursue growth for external expectations alone are typically not satisfied. Actually, if someone is working on something due to external expectations they should think hard about continuing in that path, regardless of growth. External expectations can be great motivators but only if they align with your personal goals.
In closing, any career will have good and difficult moments. There is no linear progression for any of those factors. There isn’t an easy fix either. Making changes take time and energy, and it is normal for people to accommodate to status quo for many reasons. You still owe yourself to pursue satisfaction in your work because it takes a significant portion of your life.
And just to add AI to the conversation, there are many aspects of today’s jobs that can be done by AI. That presents an opportunity for change. The great news is that a lot of those tasks taken by AI are parts of the job we don’t like in the first place. Take advantage to employ AI to take care of those, then focus your time on the fun, creative, inventive, human parts of the work!