Let’s face it, work is hard work. That’s not a clever play on words—it’s a simple truth. One of those universally acknowledged facts, like knowing that if you eat a fifteen inch pizza by yourself, you will regret it deeply. Yet, every morning, millions of us haul ourselves out of bed, caffeinate, and confront the day’s labour with essentially zero enthusiasm.
The idea of a job, any job, containing exclusively thrilling tasks and heroic moments of professional satisfaction is, I’m afraid, a fantasy. There are always aspects of a job that are painful. Yes, even the cool jobs—those that sound perfect over a beer or look dazzling on a LinkedIn profile. Take, for instance, my own scattered career path.
I’ve been fortunate enough to land some rather ‘cool’ jobs. From the AI voices of Sonantic, the machine learning algorithms at Spotify to the editing bays of Hollywood films. Yet, if I may borrow from the rich scroll of cliché, not all that glitters is gold.
Consider one of my earliest jobs: working at a skateboard shop. It started as a teenage dream. Skateboarding was not just a hobby for me; it was a community, a lifestyle, a kinetic expression of freedom. But a few months of retail reality—stacking decks, managing inventories, thumbs worn red from sandpaper griptape, fainting from a heady cloud of dust and Pledge Multi-surface Polish—sufficed to dull the sheen. “My son has holes in his shoes, I want a refund,” became a chorus so familiar that the thought of skateboarding lost its charm. My passion withered as the daily slog of skate commerce replaced the joyous abandon of actually skateboarding.
However, there’s liberation in recognising that all jobs, even the ‘cool’ ones, have their quagmires. Once you accept that no workplace is an idyllic field of professional daisies, you can stop hunting for the mythical ‘perfect job.’ That elusive role where the coffee is always hot, the colleagues always cheerful, and every task is more exhilarating than the last.
Instead, it’s far more practical—and less soul-crushing—to find a job that has enough enjoyable elements to outweigh the inevitable drudgery. Every occupation, even the most glamorous or rewarding, involves some degree of tedium. Whether it’s the monotony of meetings that could have been emails, or the Sisyphean task of keeping up with an overflowing inbox. That’s okay. The best jobs, like the best parts of life, aren’t great because they are devoid of tedium; they are great because they weave moments of real meaning into the fabric of everyday grind. (Hint: It’s all about the people.)
If you ponder it, work is much like life in its entirety. Anything truly rewarding demands effort, persistence and perhaps a bit of suffering. There’s merit in learning to accept some struggle, to recognize that the peaks are worth the troughs. In the end, the trick is not to seek out the perfect job, but to find a job that is perfect enough.