A cheat-code hard learned.
Looking through story at the intersection of Work and Life Design
Many years ago, just when I thought my career was starting to take off I had a moment of clarity which made me hit the brakes. Hard.
At the time I was working for a prestigious firm in Central London. The team I worked with was great. The organisation was great. The clients were great. Career prospects for people who can grind out a result - unparalleled.
But something was off. After a couple of years adjusting to the fast pace, long days, coffee fuelled, work hard and play hard blur - the true nature of this career began to reveal itself.
Something about how the work was won, delivered, written about and used to win further work didn’t feel right. We’d write amazing bids to get into some of the most well known organisations to end up acting as highly paid administrative help. Sure we helped clients solve problems but the incentive was to go the long way around. Utilisation always beat efficiency. If you were on a client for 80 days, leaving any days unfilled was leaving money on the table. Your work may have finished by day 59. You may have filled it with extras that nobody asked for by day 70 - with one keen eye on extending the total days to 100. The remainder might have been value add or it may have been waste - value is in the eye of the beholder and looking busy, acting important and fighting the fires (some of which were started by our colleagues) kept us around.
So we all worked to fill the number of days available. The masterful among us found ways to make seemingly simple things - like pulling together reports and summarising them for executives, into small industries. Roles, sub-roles and sub-sub-roles were added.
For most of us working in that space there was a clear route to better working. Deep down we were all signed up to menial, mundane and sometimes deeply inefficient work for years to realise a very simple trade-off.
The trade-off being that after 10-15 years of this kind of work, we’d have collected enough amazing logos, examples, certificates and industry accolades to our name to be worth more than the competitors. Examples of how we’d single handedly turned around failing programmes (insert £big number million capital spend), figured out the un-figure-out-able or done that tiny thing which caused an avalanche of return were our game. Getting these assignments became an obsession so that we could impress our credentials on similarly large organisations to get appointed as the leaders of important programmes and projects.
After 10-15 years of grind, spreadsheets and late nights fixing slides, we’d have our time on easy street - working within industry on a great salary, pension and bonus scheme. All this for doing a much easier, slower, and friendlier client side role.
For those of us who didn’t want to sacrifice their sanity on the alter of route-to-partnership, this didn’t seem like a bad medium term reality.
So I too donned my finest suit, learned the lingo and settled in.
The first few years went by in a blur. Twelve months on a central London client, five weeks in Manchester, three months in Brighton, six months in Bristol, a scant few days in Milton Keynes. Trains, hotels and lots of eating out (four days and nights of breakfast, lunch and dinner - on expenses). Thankfully I don’t drink nor take other intoxicants but colleagues who did, indulged freely, sometimes daily, sometimes deeply.
Three and a bit years in, I had my first check-up with the cardiologist. For most staff, this was a routine. The company had their own cardiologist - that’s normal right?!
That’s when it the moment of clarity came to me - it was accepted that this lifestyle, was not sustainable. It was a complete physical and mental marathon comprising stress, deadlines, sales credits, fighting for the next big opportunity, worrying about utilisation, promotion rounds, bonus rounds, bids, competitors, demanding clients, non-client practice work and the constant feeling that even within our team, we were competitors as well as collaborators. The constant feeling of being unstable due to the constant travel and time away and the daily mundanity of the work was corrosive on all elements of health.
Sitting with the cardiologist it dawned on me that building a lucrative career here came at a high cost. The cost was as complex as the work. Health, relationships with partners and children, money management, planning the year ahead and purpose - all of these would be affected by the all consuming nature of our work.
I had experienced different aspects of this. Having moved from Yorkshire to London, on the salary I was on, there was just about enough money for rent + bills + commuting. To be financially efficient, I chose a flat-share (reader be warned). The costs eventually came to include a divorce, seeing my family much less due to the sheer busyness and my physical health. The aspiration to own a place in London ramped up the pressure to land the biggest pay rise and bonus. I wasn’t alone in this. Many of my compatriots were in this boat. Each looking for the cheat-code to get their own place, reducing the cost to work in this environment.
The constant eating out eventually caught up with me - during a particularly bad period of food poisoning while working near Brighton. Hospitalised, I was done.
That’s when I had a moment of clarity. Something had to change. How I was working had to change.
So I looked around for inspiration and wow, there was lots of different ways to realise my goal.
I bought and read the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. I enjoyed working with people and creating content so wanted to stay involved in that.
Then the snake-oil salesmen found me. The work, scripted. The method, burn through the numbers as fast as possible. The cost - no cost too great.
That’s when I learned my second lesson - for the hungry and desperate, stability is more important than the cost.
I was neither hungry enough nor desperate so I shook off the snake-oil sellers.
It was then that I realised that life and work design are one and the same. What I do for work is a big component of my life. My life outcomes are tied to the fruits I get from work. Designing one or the other in isolation seems daft. It is however advisable and possible.
That’s what’s been driving me for the few years. Intention. Energy. Design.
I was annoyed that this lesson wasn’t taught at the school university or any of the extra-curricular stuff I was involved in while growing up - I guess the best lessons in life find you rather than being taught.
So in search for the new and better balance I’ve now come to realise that we’re all running on some cheat-code or other.
The cheat code which my parents and peers were all running was an intergenerational and simple one- study hard, work in a lucrative job, settle down and try do better than others always.
This doesn’t work as well anymore. Something feels off again.Having spoken to lots of people about this, I’m pretty confident that deep down most of us are now looking for a new cheat-code. That simple pattern that gets us ahead or at the very least, keeps us stable.. Whether it’s the code that allows us to take more shots or that magic sequence of things that restores our health - we’re all seekers.
So what is this new cheat-code? How does authenticity, purpose and the things we’re passionate about figure when you’ve got to find enough money to go day to day and be ready for the future?
That’s what we’ll be looking at in the next issue of Natural Work.
