Stop dreaming of the perfect job

There is one sure fire way to ensure you never find the right job. Just spend all of your time trying to find the perfect one.

No job is perfect.

But that doesn’t keep people from dwelling on every detail that doesn’t fit into their own personal narrative of what the ideal work situation should be. 

Keep doing that, and you may just be distracting yourself from the almost-perfect job that’s right under your nose. 

You’re never going to love every person you work with. You’re never going to love every project you work on. You’re never going to sell every awesome idea you have.

And thats a good thing.

You need to learn how to work with difficult people. The world is full of them. You need to learn how to take a ‘boring’ project and turn it into something fantastic. You need to learn how to deal with rejection. Killer ideas die every day. It’s your job to bounce back and come up with something even better.

Work is a lot like a relationship. If you hold it up to a ‘checklist’ of must-haves, it will surely fall short. But if you embrace its flaws and figure out how to learn from them and grow, you will actually start to love those flaws. You will welcome them. And become a better, more valuable employee as a result.

So how do you know if a job actually just plain sucks?

Again, it’s like a relationship. If a job drains the life out of you every time you even think of it, it probably sucks. If a job turns you into a version of yourself that would disgust all previous versions of yourself, it probably sucks. And if a job makes you so angry that you just want to run around all day punching people in the face, it most certainly does suck.

But if a job just makes you occasionally uncomfortable, frustrated or bored, don’t be so quick to start firing off resumes. Take a moment to honesty assess your situation. Can you learn? Can you grow? Can you build relationships with smart, creative people?

If so, then you should probably stick around for a while. Because if you jump ship, it won’t be long before you find yourself searching for the next ‘perfect’ gig. And you may never realize how close you were to almost having it.