Why jobs can be great, actually

I’ve written a few times about how I had something of a culture clash with the world of traditional jobs, one that culminated in a burnout that put me on a different life path.

Despite that, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m anti-job, and I’m certainly not anti-work, though I admit to having a few beefs with much of the culture that can pervade and surround them.

With that said, I want to outline some great aspects of jobs that are hard to reproduce elsewhere. Unless they had a clear sense of what to do instead, I think I would still encourage a new university grad to spend at least a few years in an interesting job with a great company to get a solid foundation of skills, experiences and potentially friendships that they might otherwise miss out on. Here’s why.

1. Jobs let you work with smart, engaged people on shared projects, bouncing ideas around and helping each other. By contrast, I’ve felt the absence of this as a solopreneur, where a problem that could be solved by collaboration drags on in isolation.
2. In a job, you almost certainly don’t have to do everything for yourself. Specialisation of roles means it’s someone else’s job to do various things that benefit you, and vice versa. This web of reciprocal service both lifts mental load and, hopefully, fosters connection.
3. Similarly, in a job, if you can’t do something it’s likely that someone else will be able to do it on your behalf. Whether by negotiation, explicit asks for help, or just team structure, there’s less worry about “if I don’t do it, it won’t get done at all”.
4. Although this seems to have been declining in recent years, work remains a really good place to meet and get to know new people that could have an enormous impact on your life. I met many of my closest friends at work, and I now have a baby with someone I met at work (don’t tell HR).
5. Jobs can expose you to lots of people with really different temperaments. This helps you start to see patterns and diversities in ways of being and seeing, which is valuable in its own right as an important life skill.
6. When your sense of personal mission is aligned with your employer’s goals, it frees up an enormous amount of motivational energy. You don’t need to think about how to motivate yourself when the environment does it for you.
7. Similarly, being given tasks and projects to pursue, in one form or another, also represents an incredible mental load that you don’t have to worry about. Whether you’re in an entry level position, or you’re the CEO, the scope of things you could be doing is usefully constrained. As a solopreneur, not only is the potential task landscape enormous, but I’m the one responsible for all of it.
8. Built-in ‘progression’ gives you a reasonably accurate sense that you’re improving and growing. Sure, it may be a ‘default path’, but in many cases that’s still better than either no path or having to invent your own path. I chose the latter, but I see value in the former and for many people it’s the best choice.
9. Having structures imposed on you by some system can be really helpful for mental health and general sanity. It may seem annoying in the moment, and often feels like a grind, but there is still enormous value in waking up at the same time and being around other people most days.
10. Jobs provide ongoing encouragement to improve and they expect certain quality standards from you. These standards challenge you to grow, which in the right contexts can lead to a satisfying and rewarding professional life. Of course you can create challenge for yourself, but jobs do it for you.
11. A job can be contained. You can give the job your energy between the hours of 9am and 6pm Monday to Friday and then give it no thought at all at other times. You can then freely orient your life towards family, hobbies, whatever, with the job ‘just’ paying the bills. You don’t realise how valuable this is until every waking minute could be spent working and every interest could be monetised.
12. Getting a stable amount of money every month regardless of how well you perform or how the business performs provides an incredible sense of security in the short to medium term. Of course, poor performance on either side is not sustainable, but the ‘safety net’ is valuable. Still, Taleb wasn’t wrong when he said “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
13. Jobs often confer a sense of status depending on what you’re doing and for whom. Introducing myself as the guy who designs innovation projects for Great Britain’s Electricity System Operator often felt higher status than “I have an online course and do coaching” feels now, depending on my mood and who I’m talking to.
14. Most people have jobs, so having a job immediately creates a sense of familiarity and shared experience with most other people. You can complain about your jobs, you can share job stories, you share many of the same habits, routines and aesthetics. This shared context is stabilising in its own way.
15. You can learn an enormous amount in a job that would be difficult or impossible to learn on your own. If you want to gain in-depth practical technical knowledge about how things are done, learn how to present to large audiences or how to work well with others, then a job might be your best route.
16. You often get given or offered work that is adjacent to or outside your immediate interest, or that’s on something you wouldn’t pick for yourself. While this may not always be fun, it creates serendipities where you can discover that you like something you’d never have considered on your own.

Of course, none of this is to say that jobs are the way. Obviously, I left to do my own thing. But it would be dishonest of me to claim that I don’t sometimes miss some of the benefits that jobs gave me, and under the right circumstances, I could imagine myself going back into that world for a while. Just… no big commutes again. That’s something I won’t do again.

(And, yes, this started its life as a tweet thread).