Tool 45 · Develop yourself
This exercise does not assume you need purpose from a job, and it does not talk you out of wanting it either.
A guided 16 to 20 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
If the standard came from somebody else, you are allowed to put it down without replacing it with anything.
A job that pays you properly and leaves you enough of yourself is not a compromise. For most of history it was the whole ambition.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I do not believe everybody needs to love their work. I think that idea has done a lot of damage, mostly to people whose jobs are perfectly decent and who have been persuaded they are underachieving by holding one.
What I would want to know is what work is for in your life. Money and hours, obviously. But also whether you are treated like an adult, whether you are any good at it, whether there is anybody there you like, and what state you are in when you walk through the door at the end of it. Those are the things that actually determine whether a job is bearable.
The trap is when a thin week gets blamed on the job. If there is nothing much in the evenings and the weekends have gone quiet, work becomes the only thing big enough to be at fault. Changing employer does nothing for that, and people find out at considerable expense.
None of which excuses a bad job. Pay you cannot live on, contempt from a manager, hours that wreck your health. Those are not expectation problems and no amount of perspective fixes them.
What you'll get
01
Expectation against provision
02
Where the gap sits
03
Non negotiables
04
Whether to change anything
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
What you actually need work to provide.
02 · Test it
Describe your job to somebody without using the word just.
What I would do
Separate what you expect from what you were taught to expect.
List what the job actually provides before you list what it lacks.
Notice whether the flatness is in the job or in the week.
Hold the line on pay, safety and being treated decently.
Allow the answer to be that it is a job and that is fine.
Test it
What do you actually need work to give you?
Whose idea of a career are you measuring yourself against?
If your week outside work were fuller, would this job still be the problem?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the work is not enough. Two alternatives are often stronger. The expectation may be borrowed rather than yours, absorbed from parents, a degree course or fifteen years of people describing their jobs as journeys, and it can be put down. Or the dissatisfaction may not be about the job at all. Where the rest of the week is thin, work is the only structure available to hold the disappointment, and it will keep holding it in the next job too. Sometimes the finding is that the job is decent, the expectation is fair, and the honest answer is that nothing needs to change.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If the question is what you are paying for the arrangement
Further thinking
Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work
Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues
Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
Article
Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues
The study that found people in identical roles describe their work as a job, a career or a calling in roughly equal thirds. None of the three is the correct answer.
Article
Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers
Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.
Book
David Graeber
Graeber on work that the person doing it privately believes is pointless. Argumentative and overstated in places, and still the sharpest account of a particular modern misery.
Article
Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton
Evidence that people reshape the same job substantially without changing the job title. Worth reading before concluding the only route is out.