Should you quit? (A design-thinking take)
I used to dread Mondays. In the past, work felt like a battle. No matter how well I presented my ideas or performed, I felt completely overlooked as both a person and a professional.
This isn’t a slate at one specific job from my past, but instead a comment on how I viewed problems in my life before design (corny, I know).
Often, I would dream of quitting and getting some role at Vogue or Google, doing god-knows-what for god-knows-why. Then maybe, I reasoned, people would take me seriously.
So, you ask, what changed?
When I entered the world of design, these feelings did not go away immediately. In fact, sometimes I still experience them.
What changed for me, however, was a conversation I had with a mentor a couple of years ago. I was explaining to him my feelings of being devalued, and like no matter how right I was, or how well I articulated myself, nobody would ever listen to me.
In that conversation, he asked;
“What do you think you need right now out of your job? Do you feel you’re getting it?”
While these questions may seem obvious, they had never occurred to me until that moment. Before speaking to him, everyone would immediately say “quit.” Instead, his approach was far more realistic; “there will always be annoying aspects of work — but what annoying things are you willing to deal with?”
As a result of this conversation, I managed to move into a role that has allowed me to vastly improve as a designer. It’s not that the prior role was evil or bad, but that it was not what I needed at that time.
When you design something, I think the approach is similar too. What do the users really need here? What shortcuts are bad, what shortcuts are perhaps okay (for now)?
Just because I enjoy my job and my team now, doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes have to ask myself these questions. Work, relationships etc aren’t always going to be 100% amazing all of the time. It is very normal to have suggestions for how to improve a relationship, or maybe even move teams internally at work etc.
How this applies to you…
Dropping a relationship or a job completely isn’t always the solution. Instead, zooming out and asking why when you’re unhappy will allow you to make a situation work for you (whether that means quitting now or later, or even just making a few changes).
To do this “zooming out”, I like speaking to my therapist, boyfriend, mentors, or friends. Additionally, writing in a journal is a great way to spot thought patterns over time. Sometimes, I didn’t realize how bad some situations were till I reread my diary entries from months past.
This week…
I challenge you to think about one situation that you’re not super thrilled about. What do you really need? Do you need to make a small change, or take a completely new direction?
