How to survive in a job you don’t love

How To Survive In A Job You Don’t Love

You might be in a job you don’t love right now.

For lots of reasons. Could be that the company is a mess. Internal politics. The product stinks. Your boss is a dork. There’s not enough kombucha on tap. Wrong market, wrong timing, the vibes are off. Whatever it is. Many factors.

But here’s the thing I don’t hear people talk about enough: the company you’re at is never going to be perfect. The grass is always greener. Someone tells you “omg you work at Apple, that’s amazing.” The next person says “I worked at Apple, worst job of my life.”

Years ago I was stuck in a job I wasn’t happy in and felt like I could be doing more. I was ready to jump ship, but a mentor told me to stick it out. Change the lens. Get selfish for bit. You might not be happy here, but what’s in it for you? Can you see what you can learn here? You’re basically getting paid to learn on the job.

I wanted to share this quick anecdote because I realize it’s a great frame for thinking about marketing and work with AI right now.

Even if you’re not in your dream job, you could be getting paid in your current role to really understand AI and what it can do for marketing. Heck, for the broader business. Not just the little ol’ marketing department. This could be your MBA for the future.

So why not play offense? Take this as an opportunity. Go figure it out. Learn and build. Do some great work you can show. Then 6-12 months from now you can go explore new opportunities with skills most marketers don’t have yet. Or maybe what you build changes things at the current company and new opportunities show up there.

Check out these lines from a job listing for a content role at Ramp:

“You’re AI-native. You’ve used AI to fundamentally change how content gets made. You have a strong opinion on where this is headed and you’re already building toward it. But you’d never outsource taste to a tool.

Fair Warning: This role is not for someone who prefers an established playbook. It’s a true builder role. And if AI is something you’ve been meaning to get around to, we’re not the place to figure it out. You should be experimenting and building already.”

You could be using the job you don’t love right now to train for the next big step in your career.

So that’s the frame. There’s a lot of nuance in your career, the company you’re at, and job searching, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I’m an optimist. I’ll always try to put that spin on things. This frame really worked for me.

The company was HubSpot. At the time I was the podcast producer. My full-time job was to run the podcast, but I saw all the cool things the broader marketing team was doing and I wanted to be more involved. I ended up learning a ton from people on that team. I got to see what good looked across content, website, demand gen, and events and that learning was huge for me before taking my first real marketing manager job at Drift.

One more thought on the Ramp listing. See where it says “you’re AI-native”? That’s the bar now. The top companies are asking for it, which means everyone else will follow. We all copy each other if you can’t tell…

So whether you believe in it or not, this is where things are headed. Companies expect their marketers to be AI-native.

And to my point earlier: if you feel behind, why not start now? You don’t need permission from your current job. You can start today, regardless of how you feel about where you work.

I’m trying to do this too. It’s hard. I want to default back to Default Dave. That’s gotten me pretty far. But now I get to take everything I’ve learned about marketing over the last 15 years and use AI to multiply it. I want to master AI so I can defeat it and keep my job forever, OK.

I hope this mindset is helpful wherever you’re at in your career. Reply back if you want. I’m happy to help if I can.

– Dave

P.S. One other thing on my mind this week.

AI has eaten the boring middle of marketing. Headlines, descriptions, thumbnails, blog post titles, nurture emails, the copy on the landing page nobody reads. All of it can be automated now. And it will be.

But if everyone is using the same tools to spit out the same generic version of that stuff… if every thumbnail has that ridiculous OMG face with the fake AI hands… what happens?

That’s where the opportunity is. Go the other direction. Take chances. Stand out. Do something a robot would never do.

OK gotta run. Writing this at 5:02 AM at the airport in Burlington, VT about to board a flight to DC. Told Dan I’d get him this newsletter this morning.

Hope you’re having a productive week.

Proof of human.

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