A question BEFORE a job hunt

When your working life gets interrupted, everyone asks the same question. So, what are you looking for?

It's a kind question. It's also premature. Before you can answer what you're looking for, you need to know what you're choosing between, and almost nobody has that list.

I didn't.

So before I started looking for anything, I went and built it.

The default is invisible until it breaks

A career runs on autopilot for years at a time. You don't choose it every morning. You inherit it, then you maintain it. Promotions, reorgs, new managers, none of it disturbs the assumption underneath, which is that a salary is how you fund a life.

An interruption disturbs it. Redundancy, illness, a move, a company that stops needing you. However it arrives, the same thing happens. The default stops running long enough for you to get a proper look at it.

That look is worth more than the time off. Most people never get it, and the ones who do usually spend it filling the gap as fast as possible rather than examining what the gap revealed.

What a salary actually does

A salary does one job. It buys your time back by selling most of it first.

There are other routes to the same number. Self Employment. Fewer, larger engagements. A lower cost base in a cheaper country. Assets you already own, working harder. Some combination of all four, which is what most people who look genuinely happy at fifty seem to end up with.

Many people I have coached present an unfulfilled moral ambition, a path that allows them to pursue something more noble. Without doing the real maths they're unable to even contemplate an alternative.

Most people can't name three alternatives to their salary. Not because the alternatives don't exist. Because there has never been a reason to price them, so the salary stops looking like a choice and starts looking like an obligation.

Pricing them takes an afternoon. I worked out what a year of our life actually costs, then how I could cover it. The number came back smaller than I expected.

Not small. Smaller.

That isn't optimism. It's a spreadsheet. Optimism is what happens after the spreadsheet says yes.

The point isn't that the answer isn't always 'start your own business'. The answer might well be a job, and if it is, you'll take it knowing exactly what it beat rather than hoping it was the only thing on offer.

The ten minute version

You don't have to wait for an interruption to run this.

Write down what your life costs for a year. The real number, not the one you'd prefer. Then list every route to that number that isn't your current job. No editing, no feasibility check, just the list.

Most people stall at two. That's the finding, and it's a much better thing to discover that today, before somebody else forces the question.

I went into the longer version of this idea in Build Your Own Roof.

A job was always an exchange rather than a guarantee. That makes it a choice, and choices are things you can compare.

Next week: what happens when you stop treating your constraints as the problem.