New York Lawyer
July 17, 2001

Q:
I landed the job of my parents� dreams in a respected New York firm only eight months ago, but I�m miserable. I can�t say I hate every minute of it, but occasionally I throw up on Monday mornings.

Trouble is, I know I�m not evaluating the situation objectively. Maybe I should realize I�m not suited for it and try something new. Equally possibly, this is the first thing I�ve ever encountered in my whole life that was this demanding. Maybe I�m just spoiled, and should suck it up, grow up and suffer in silence for a awhile. What do you think?

Submit Your Question

Find More Answers

A:
I think objective self-assessment is one of the hardest things in the world, particularly at the outset of a career. Looking into one�s motivational mirror and trusting the reflection you get back has an additional complication for bright, achievement-oriented people: they frequently confuse what they are capable of doing with what they are temperamentally suited to do. Many of us view our satisfaction equation upside down, so it says, �Anything I can do, I should do.� Or, as my old man used to put it, �It doesn�t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.�

He was wrong. It does matter, at least in the long run. Yes, at the outset of our careers, it may be necessary to �pay your dues,� suffering considerable pain so that you can reap huge gain later on. But overall career satisfaction requires one to honor what Timothy Butler and James Waldroop call �deeply-embedded life interests.� These DELI�s are �long held, emotionally-driven passions, intricately interwined with personality, born jointly of nature and nurture.� (See Harvard Business Review, September 1999, p. 145). By the time we reach adulthood, each of us has developed a fairly stable �operative style� that shapes our motivations, satisfactions, values, incentives and aversions. This style, which can be charted through a variety of self-assessment tools and measures (such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and others), describes what makes us comfortable, what turns us on and, conversely, what frustrates us, annoys us, causes us pain or leaves us cold.

These fundamental motivational markers usually don�t change much after about age 25. So if you build a career path that ignores or abrades them, don�t expect things to magically feel great at work � near term or long term. You may be able to numb or deny them for awhile, but few things, including large amounts of money, can successfully compensate for starvation of one�s primary emotional nutritional groups.

Therefore, if you are experiencing major career unrest at the firm, and you keep muttering, �This too will pass,� you have to ask another question: �Just what is it I think will pass?� If the nature and structure of your work tasks is bound to change (and improve in realistically foreseeable ways) with time and experience, you may decide to grin and bear it. I think people can put up with an almost unbelievable amount of discomfort � if they know it isn�t forever. Seen in this light, young associates who want/need a lot of autonomy, discretion and personal control may really bridle in the early lockstep years of associatehood. But if they�re still around by Year Four or Five, they begin to enjoy significantly more responsibility and running room. But if, as was my case, one is fundamentally averse to conflict (to a degree you may not have previously been aware of), a career in litigation will keep rubbing the painful spots forever; the irritant being an integral part of the role, not a temporary condition keyed to early-stage career blues.

Therefore, one essential step at this point is to do the most detailed examination you can (write it down and illustrate it with examples) of what exactly it is that is making you unhappy. Nature of the setting? Nature of colleagues? Nature of the work? Conditions of employment? Few opportunities for advancement? Constant threat of unemployment? Overt competition with peers and superiors? Intellectual boredom or lack of variety? Power trippin� by your elders? Insufficient responsibility? Trying to translate thought and action into six-minute billable increments? What? WHAT?

If more than one issue is causing you heartburn, work hard to tease them apart and prioritize them. It�s tempting to aggregate into One Big Misery that you can use to generate enough self-righteous dudgeon to justify screaming, �I don�t have to take this any more!� But don�t do that. That�s a chicken�s way out. Work hard to look at your motives, satisfactions and irritants in terms of which are fundamental, which are incidental. Which are permanent, which are transient. Which stem from issues of self-development and self-realization and which focus on such �instrumental� satisfactions as economic security, optimizing income, or status/conformity needs.

At this point, it is often very hard to distinguish what you want from what others tell you that you should want. Just remember that you will not be given two lives to live � the first to placate everyone else and the second to address your own needs and satisfactions.

�I�m miserable� is not a diagnosis. It�s not even a symptom. It�s a signal that something is wrong. You need longer, deeper, more structured self-examination to find out whether you can take two aspirin and walk off the pain, or whether a heart transplant is truly in order.

Sincerely,
Douglas B. Richardson
President, The Richardson Group