Sometime in early 2019, we devoted the end of an all hands meeting at Animalz to a dashboard confessional question:

“What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?”

Responses ranged from mind-numbingly manual to gross. Like, vomit on aisle 3 gross.

Getting out of a crappy job feels like the epilogue of a near death experience. Cliffhanger over. You made it. What are you going to do next?

Working in a crappy job makes you grateful for the most basic things: your own desk and chair, the opportunity to take on a new challenge everyday, the time you have to think.

They also show you what it feels like to sit still.

Life on the couch can be fun for awhile. Everyone needs time to rest, save, figure out what’s next. Crappy jobs help you survive and let you escape.

Inevitably, you get enough practice in that you get bored and start to look for more. Every bear comes out of hibernation eventually.

Leaving jobs you burn out from, you build your values around the parts of your previous jobs that got you up every morning and the stuff that sucked all of the energy out of you. Your values help you figure out what you want, what you need, and what you can’t and won’t tolerate.

Is your current job crappy?

Etc unfortunate etc.

These are all signs of a crappy job, but we’ve all heard the story of the janitors who find fulfillment in their hospital jobs:

Many of them reported going out of their way to learn as much as possible about the patients whose rooms they cleaned, down to which cleaning chemicals were likely to irritate them less. “It was not just that they were taking the same job and feeling better about it, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and whistling. It was that they were doing a different job.”
What these workers were doing, Wrzesniewski came to realize, was quietly creating the work that they wanted to do out of the work that they had been assigned -- work they found meaningful and worthwhile.

They are mindful of their surroundings and the opportunity they have to do good. Purpose creates gratitude wherever you are. What would make your work more fulfilling?

The thing that gets many of us through hard days aside from the need to meet basic dollar bills needs is the presence and support of our teams, and the opportunity to do good work that makes life better for other people. At a “crappy” job, that’s all there is - the team, the people, the soul.

This is a good thing to learn early. The company culture, the team and the way it evolves will make or break your work experience.

“It’s just a job” is a pretty terrible way to spend 40 hours a week, but our default. Work was, for awhile, subhuman.

Our collective ancestors toiled in fields and forests. Our parents and grandparents left life at home for 8-10 hours a day to go to jobs they may have liked but probably hated. They built systems for us to be able to do knowledge work, to live consciously across all parts of our lives, to use not just our hands, but our heads and our hearts at work.

It’s just a job?

It’s a job, but it’s your life, your time.

Automation hasn't replaced human labor completely, but it largely will. The working conditions we’ll tolerate has changed.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

A great workplace considers not just an employees basic physical needs but their mind and soul as well, not because a company can meet every need, but to understand and work with not against each person’s quest for fulfillment.

The decisions companies make from offering better incentives, remote work options, time off, diversity and inclusion initiatives, career training/retraining and development are all tailored to support conscious, whole humans at work in the knowledge age. People uncompromisingly aware of their humanity - so let them go surfing!

If a job description sounds soul crushing, it might be. Can you imagine yourself doing the things described day in and day out enthusiastically? Mindfully?

If you try to just tune out, your work will suffer and your life will suffer. Spending time vacating the mental premises because you hate your job will limit your ability to lead a fulfilling life outside of work. Reality check, please. Selective numbing doesn’t really work, and if you’re able to do your job mindlessly, you’re probably pretty replaceable by technology or a newer, hungrier, cheaper person.

Your title and pay are the shell of your work. What you fill it with is what makes or breaks it. Most of your work will be somewhat repetitive on the surface so it’s important to be able to imagine yourself feeling connected in the things you’re doing a lot of.

distribution of bullshit, an approximation

Crappy jobs are the chip on your shoulder that keep you humble, present and kind. They remind you everyday of how far you’ve come and how you continue to grow. You have more perspective from this vantage point. Companies like JobStep use this perspective to help you find and transition to more fulfilling, higher paying jobs in fields like customer success and data analysis.

This isn’t a follow your dreams pep talk, although maybe you eventually get there. I hope I do; I think I am.

I teach indoor cycling. I’m passionate about it. It consumes about 10 hours a week. But it isn’t my end goal. What I love about indoor cycling is the opportunity to tell stories, support others, connect inward and outwardly, and get results. That’s all stuff I get to do in my day job, too.

Crappy jobs remind you of the importance of creating and extracting intrinsic value from the work you do everyday. You create value by understanding what you value. You. Not your company, although hopefully your values align.

I value growth. Every job I’ve had has been a great job because of the growth opportunity. If I was still working at any of my previous jobs, I may consider them crappy; I leave before I hit a perceived growth ceiling and as my values evolve.

Working for a company where there's is an obvious ceiling can be discouraging. Work somewhere that you can be purposeful. Work somewhere you can see the sky, where the horizon is always extending in front of you. If you’re not sure, if you don’t see it, talk to someone. It’s there.

Big company people may argue that at a certain point it isn’t about what’s next, it’s about what’s here, right in front of your face. It’s a different kind of growth - structured, stable.

Crappy jobs remind you to look up and to keep moving forward.