In the years after graduating from college, I traveled all over the world and met a ton of people. Whenever I met first-world people who were unhappy, and we got to drinking and carousing a bit, I had two pieces of advice I would always give.
- Quit your job
- Curate a powerful psychedelic experience for yourself
I like to think I’ve grown a lot since those days, but there’s a core truth to that advice for people who are unhappy with how they spend their time.
The truth is that it’s seldom just the job (or how you spend your time) that’s the problem. The crux is in your relationship with your activity. So you can’t just change your job – you have to change yourself.
This is all a lot more mainstream now, but there’s a key element of that old philosophy that needs amending.
Quitting your job is not enough.
The pull of the past and our patterns is strong enough that most people who quit shitty jobs end up applying for another job that makes them unhappy.
Why?
Because quitting your job and taking LSD are both reactive moves. Good moves. But essentially reactive. And the secret to finding a job that doesn’t suck is to be Proactive.
By Proactive I mean creating the experience you want to live in your imagination. It’s like theater or a role-playing game. The more detail we imagine in advance, the clearer idea we have of what we want, and the more information we are giving ourselves when we’re faced with actual opportunities.
If I quit my Engineering job at Google and say, “I want to work for a smaller company,” that’s a start.
But if I can specify what I want to do, what kind of management style works for me, what ways of communication set me off, what culture I’m trying to inhabit (or create), how I want to use my time (between coding, research, design, meetings, QA, devops, etc.), I will have a lot more criteria to apply to a job offer than just salary, benefits, and # of days in the office.
It’s like the quote goes: “Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality”.
(Internet says it’s either Robin Sharma or Stephen Covey, but I heard it through The 12 Week Year, so 🤷)
Pro tip: The carefully organized psychedelic trip has a lot of business value in creating the mental space to do the Proactive Visioning. Use the opportunity wisely.
Ankur Shah Delight: Community and Conflict 