Employment, like unfortunate romantic relationships, often follows a similar pattern: when we are just starting in a new place, we are excited, taking the initiative, and eager to do our best work. Gradually, the novelty and the feeling of a new beginning wears off, and with it wanes our interest in the new job. We switch into routine execution mode, and the cool and exciting new company you’re working for transforms into the “day job”. It becomes something that we do habitually, taking a little thought about how to increase shareholder value. We work the work as we did the day before and we forget about it in the evening. Because that’s how life is, isn’t it?

Depending on your personality and life experience, you might still be very proactive, take the initiative and responsibility, but the motivation is different now. It doesn’t come from this blazing inner drive anymore, it comes from some weaker, more muted sources: ambition, convictions about oneself, or the desire to prove something to ourselves or other people.

But none of those work half as well as the pure, child-like urge to create and build stuff. Driving a car on cheap fuel won’t get you very far and will often cause your car to break. When we operate on such second-hand motivation sources, we get frustrated by things small and large. Unexpected negative feedback from a customer, an extra meeting without an agenda and proper resolution, a project that got scrapped, routine mechanical tasks, you name it. And the irritation builds up like rust, slowly eating away at the engine. Gradually, we turn our backs on our day job, and Sunday becomes a bitter-sweet day.

Obviously, it is always a mixed basket. There are some things that we still like: coworkers, the product, or the initiatives we work on. One constant advantage you might have is if you’re really passionate about your profession, then regardless of the company you work for, you’ll have this as a pro in your basket. The more such pros you have, the better your job will feel. But the unfortunate nature of human beings is that no matter how small the cons in the basket were at the start, they will grow in our perception until they obscure all our sight, and we can’t see anything else besides them. When it happens, it gets harder to bring ourselves to work, we start to procrastinate and shift our attention to other things. It might be personal things, like doubling down on health, hobbies or focusing on relationships with a partner and family. Or it might be work-related — that’s when the ideas about a side project or an own venture appear.

We start to do side projects just so that we feel this passion again, and in comparison, our day job looks pale. We realize that on a day job, we get to do barely 10% of what we actually enjoy doing compared to pure, unequivocal fun working on a personal project.

The problem I see with such projects is that our performance on the job starts to dwindle. It becomes a distraction, something that gets in the way of doing the fun stuff. But when you have 8 hours of distraction daily, always demanding coworkers in Slack and stupid meetings, it grows into a really unhealthy attitude towards work.

It just doesn’t feel right that after some time, all we want is to distract ourselves from our job, either with side projects or personal matters. So I asked myself, are there people who are actually happy to do their job every day, who still have this inner drive and don’t want to run away from their job? Yes, there are, and such people usually have “Founder” title in their LinkedIn profiles.

It’s the same thing that keeps founders passionate about their products years and years after their creation that makes us so excited to finally get off work and tinker with personal projects — it’s that we care. We can work on it until bedtime, go to sleep thinking about it, and wake up the next day to continue. It completely occupies our headspace and we have such a massive stream of improvement ideas that we never had on a day job. We have zero problems with prioritization and choosing what to do next, and the only problem we have is that there’s not enough time in a day. That’s how powerful caring is as a fuel to keep us going. When we care about a project or a business, we want it to succeed, with no regard for other people’s opinions, not trying to impress anyone or make money off of it. We just care about the damn thing.

But when we work on someone else’s dream, we don’t care as much as the founders. For employees, the day job is often a means to get a paycheck, and that’s where all our disappointment comes from. Money is about as good a motivator as a participation medal (at least personally). Obviously, we won’t ever care as much as founders unless we become one ourselves, but since it directly correlates with how happy we are at work, it is in our best interest to care about the “day job” more.

There are two things we usually care about: ideas and people. Ideas are the industry your company works in, the product, and the value that it brings. I can assure you that there are zero people working in online gambling who are happy with their work, no matter how much money they make (except perhaps for the founder).

By people, I mean two things: first is the coworkers, with whom you work together as a team on a common goal. It’s arguably even more important than an idea, we can endure horrible conditions if we like the people with whom we got into it. And I couldn’t count how many times I heard that people consciously decided to stay in miserable working environments simply because they liked the people and couldn’t let them down. A good indicator of what kind of people are working in the company is to look at the founders since we tend to hire people who resemble us and hold similar views. If founders are made from a different dough, there’s a high likelihood that you won’t like it there.

The second thing regarding people is the customers. If your customers are the ones that you can easily relate to or even consider yourself one of them, you’ll care much more. It’s the biggest reward to work on a product you use yourself, as most designers would be delighted to work in Figma and most engineers in GitHub.

To find such a company that you will care about, with an idea and people that speak to you, you must do your homework before you sign the offer. Unfortunately, most of the time, we are so desperate to get out of our current job that we grew to hate, that we rush to the next one and take the first offer that we can get in the vain hope that it will be better this time. And what happens is that history repeats itself, and we’re getting on the same rollercoaster ride we just had: novelty and excitement, routine, repulsion, and burnout. Update the CV, contact the recruiters.

We must be more intentional and take our time while choosing the next workplace. The goal is to find a job that you will care about. Consider what you want at this point in your life from your next job and what you are currently interested in, and do not compromise. I know it’s tough when the market is not in your favor, and this is a bit of foul advice if your life circumstances are such that you cannot pay your bills, but if you can afford to give yourself some time — be patient and genuine with your job search. Out of four kids in the chocolate factory story, only Charlie genuinely cared about going on the tour, and only he got to the end of it. So don’t rush and look for your golden ticket.