This makes a point against the "CEO morning routine" kind of approach, but from my point of view, it is not that different from that perspective on life. It still talks about "proactively moving towards #1 or top 25%", "be so good they can't ignore you", "10x work", "something extraordinary" etc.
Take that direction if that's what makes you tick. I've decided that that's not how I want to live my life, quit a 'prestigious' position, left the competitive career, and I now work as a teacher with "10x personal satisfaction".
Only semi-related to satisfaction, but I was looking at a chart of suicide rates by industry recently[0]. And the lowest rate for both men and women was "Education services" and "Education, training, and library," aka teachers.
My guesses as to why:
- To teach is to be focused on the future, day after day. This is the opposite of dwelling on the past, which is commonly associated with depression, which is commonly associated with suicide.
- Teachers are surrounded by kids, and kids tend to change and develop drastically over the course of a year, usually for the better in terms of knowledge and maturity. Seeing that might inspire some optimism.
- Teachers are a crucial pillar of an impressionable community of hundreds of children at that. So they're less likely to trend toward suicide, because they feel less alone, more community, more accountability, and more responsibility.
- There's something inherently purposeful about teaching, at a deep biological level. Purposeful work leads to a purposeful life leads to lower chances of suicide.
Or maybe it's easy to just drop out of teaching? Versus a more specialized profession, like dentistry?
Also, you'll notice that the highest suicide professions are also the most physically dangerous. It stands to reason that suicide often follows a life-changing debilitating injury. That would be pretty rare in teaching.
The complexity of a field you are leaving doesnt make it hard to drop out. A dentist is very well prepared to be a hair stylist, but I've never heard of that choice.
Dentists also don't have a lot of job related debilitating injuries, aside from depressions.
But also - you can end up with class of unruly spoiled kids and experience burnout after burnout. You see almost any higher profession have much more money in their lives, despite having a massive amount of free time. But that free time ain't so huge as it may seem - good teachers keep preparing themselves even in their 50s for next day, grading, school bureaucracy etc.
I have a climbing buddy who is US origin and teaches smaller kids in Geneva, Switzerland in prestigious private school, all above applies hard for him. Got off this school year twice from burnout. Normally he has 1-2 bad kids but this year it was 10, every day was pure suffering for him and even with assistant it was above their capabilities. The thing is, its a profession that makes you unemployable elsewhere apart from basic blue collar jobs, so quitting is not really that good of an option.
Just giving perspective, I am not teacher and probably wouldn't enjoy doing it. Preferring work hard and then have some cool time in the mountains during evenings/weekend or travel for holidays. But I consider it massively underpaid profession, those folks deserve same recognition as doctors are getting (with logic that doctors 'just' treat current problems, but teachers literally hold future of mankind in their hands and mold it, and in this world you cca always get what you pay for).
it's certainly possible to be depressed due to dwelling on the future. i guess it'd be anxiety or if you're just in a terrible situation with no easy way out
Is that because of pay and CoL? I imagine if you work hard in your 40s and have a lot of financial success, transitioning to teaching might be less stressful.
If you already have a house and a fat 401k, just paying the bills at a certain age is fine.
The actual teaching is like 10% of the job at best and shrinking, school administrators have to be the dumbest category of people who hold advanced degrees (I don’t level that charge lightly), schools are heavily hierarchical and hard to influence toward improvement if you’re not in admin, constant methodology churn for all sorts of things based on whichever new “system” caught the superintendent’s fancy at their last district-funded drinking getaway er, I mean, conference. Which they’ll go on to half-understand, fail to apply the parts that make them uncomfortable, and of course doom the new program without its even having a chance. While creating a bunch of new work for the teachers and breaking stuff that was working fine. “Office” politics where the median would qualify as quite bad in the private sector.
Politicians and half the parents think you’re the enemy, in a very real way. No support from parents on discipline issues. Admin piss-pants scared of parents, too. Comp-vs-CoL varies wildly over the country, and mostly in the ways you’d expect, so it’s ok some places but it’s terrible in many others.
Yeah exactly. I don’t even think he’s right about how pivotal a lot of them bellwether events he cites are. If you don’t nail the punchline in your marketing you can change the punchline or the marketing. So it’s important but because it can be changed you might find yourself taking another path than “home run marketing” that is still very successful. For all he’s decrying hustle culture he seems very immured in it.
Take that direction if that's what makes you tick. I've decided that that's not how I want to live my life, quit a 'prestigious' position, left the competitive career, and I now work as a teacher with "10x personal satisfaction".