Do less work for the same money.
I had been told this in a previous role. It was not negative. More of an exchange of privileged information. A show of mutual respect and understanding.
I have never pursued any job opportunity for its money. For much of my career, the goal was to work alongside writers and editors who would help me grow creatively and professionally. Later, it was about learning all aspects of a business and applying a combination of strategy and hands-on skills to increase revenues, branding, and support marketing channels broadly.
Go back eight years to when I wrote one blog post and 200 to 300 product descriptions each month. My compensation was $40K yearly. I was over the moon.
Eight years later, what I worked on daily included dissecting research studies for tidbits of usual data, interviewing health practitioners, writing and editing long-form technical articles, managing writers and project timelines, developing content strategies, and tackling technical SEO tasks. Some of these responsibilities were handed down to me. For others, I took it upon myself to prove that I could succeed while adding another element to my resume. When I took on additional work, I spent up to ten hours doing them. Nobody requested this work.
The tasks in my job description rarely required more than 10 hours of work each week. They took so little time because I had refined my skills and developed so much industry knowledge that I could complete them more efficiently. For example, at one time, a 1,000-word blog would have taken me at least two full days to research, write, edit, and publish. Now, I could do the same job in under an hour. This applied to all aspects of my day-to-day.
For this effort, I earned $50K a year.
Those with a similar skill set would earn double or triple my compensation.
And still, I did not ask for more. The reasons were simple. The first is that, at the time, I did not believe I deserved it. The second is that I wanted to fly under the radar.
I wanted to remain unseen because I was left with a lot of free time. During that time, I played video games, went for long walks, took up mountain biking, worked on a myriad of failed novels, and started building a relationship with the person who is my partner.
I did feel some shame, but never for long. The company had an open-book policy, and I could see that my work helped generate tens of millions in revenue and generous profits. At the same time, the company spoke of work-life balance and the importance of personal growth. As all of my work was done on time, my performance reviews were solid, and nobody complained about the quality of my work, I took this to mean that my approach was fair and balanced.
Time marched on, and things began to change.
The company had leased new office space and wanted people to come in three, four, or even five days a week.
I exhaled a curse of anger, not for the loss of remote work, but for the dollar figure on the lease. That damn privileged information all over again.
Before these looming office mandates, I had moved in with my partner. The goal was to allow my partner to be near her work, to save money on rent, and to be near her parents. With this new office initative, I would be taking a roughly $15K pay cut between time spent in traffic (3 hours daily), a car payment to replace my aging car that could no longer handle the commute, gas, tires, depreciation, etc., all to do a job I had been doing effectively at home and without issue for years.
If I come into the office, it will have to provide me with something in return for reasons that felt entirely justified.
Do less work for the same money.
At this point, I should have exploded. Wildly applying to jobs before slamming my resignation on someone’s desk.
I still did nothing, and the company did nothing. I was politely redirected back to my usual tasks.
This was somewhat strange to me. Since our teams were skeleton crews working diligently to hold the ship afloat, and I kept hearing rhetoric about running a faster mile, raising the bar, and how change is necessary, I thought there might be some incentive to meet in the middle. I had the time, the skillset, and the drive. And I would be cheaper than hiring new people.
More privileged information flowed into my ear.
Take advantage of the intangibles and do not help those who will not help themselves.
History and experience should have already told me this.
From this point forward, I did everything asked of me. The difference is my new adherence to the mantra: Act your wage. I no longer put in the extra effort. I worked my ten hours and diligently whittled that into five.
Then, my career was over. It took longer than expected, and the reason for its end depends on who is privileged to what information.
Now, I find myself at an interesting crossroads, and I must ask, how should I continue?
Is it with a winner-takes-all mindset? Job hopping every two years to ensure I leave nothing on the table again?
That would undoubtedly help, given the new reality that it can take hundreds of applications and a year or longer to get an offer for a job. There is also the so-called death of loyalty between employees and employers, and it is imperative that anyone creates the largest nest egg possible to protect themselves when a career ends a second, third, or fourth time.
But I am who I am today and where I am today because of what the intangibles provided to me. Is there more left to uncover from working only ten hours with less money?
These are hard questions I am looking to answer. Even if you do not aspire to work, a career is part of a person’s life journey when they live in a society like ours. You should want to make the most of it in one way or another.
Reflecting on everything, I do not regret or harbor ill will toward anyone, but I ponder how some things might have changed.
Had I known I deserved more, might I have earned all that money but wound up alone without a partner or a dog? What good would that have done?
On the other hand, I could argue that we would have ended up in the same place but with a house, two dogs, and the funds to rain riches upon ourselves.
Without a time machine, these are questions never to be answered.
With the acceptance of that technological (or magical) absence, I will acknowledge that there is plenty of time left to make more mistakes, but with a bit more foresight this time. I realize that as a person with a skillset, I have value, and to demand that value is correct because our society has deemed this the right way to operate.
My goal will also be to find future employment that offers the privilege of information so I can share insights with those who feel uncertain about their wages.