I don't like my profession anymore. What should I do? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Jonathan Brodsky, S.V.P. of Chicken Soup for the Soul, former Director at 1-800-flowers, on Quora.
I remember the first time I hated my profession. I was 23 and in finance. So I quit to write (awful) novels. Almost all of the people I worked with in that first job are millionaires now. Oops.
I remember the first time I wanted to start a company. So I did it. It failed spectacularly. In fact, that happened a few times before I got it right. Starting a company is really, really, really hard. Most of the time, it's not a great way to make a living. None of my companies ever made me rich, and only a few were intellectually satisfying.
I decided, maybe, that I didn't hate my profession that much, and went back into it. Nope. Still hated finance.
So I spent all the time I could learning other things. I learned how to code. I learned how to sell. I learned how to cook. If someone else was doing it and I thought it was interesting, I tried to figure out how. I still do this all the time.
It turns out that's what I'm good at - figuring out how other people do stuff, and then improving on it. It took me a while to realize that's what I'm good at, and I know that I have a long way to go. It took me a while because you suck at doing things when you first learn them, and then you want to give up. It takes a long time to realize how many different things you have to learn and string together to get a skill set that works in a lot of situations. It's getting to a level of knowledge where everything you do is an application of basic theories you understand well.
That's why experienced coders can talk about how easy it is to learn other languages. They just think of it all as implementing theory that they understand well with some variations in syntax, built-in functions, and other things. Yeah, people will shout at each other about some things that you can do in Haskell that are stupidly hard in Javascript, but most software (and therefore most software engineers) don't need to care about those things to do their job.
By the way, I'm not one of those experienced coders. My code still sucks. I am constantly asking people to fix it for me.
It's why, once you've learned how to sell one thing really well, you can sell a lot of different things. Sometimes, I do this really annoying thing when people tell me that selling a product is impossible. I get on the phone with one of their leads and sell the damn thing. It's just applied theory. And the theory is really simple - ask what they want, and then give that thing to them. A lot of salespeople turn out to be really bad at listening, so they never really appreciate this. Listening means hearing everything the other person has to say, not just what you want to hear. It's a really hard thing to learn.
I don't know what you're interested in. You need to sit down and figure that out. And, if you're not sure, you might need to go and ask your friends and family what they think you're interested in. That's how Danny Meyer started his restaurant empire- he was going off to law school, and didn't want to take his LSATs and didn't want to be a lawyer. His uncle asked him why he was going to spend his life doing something he hated, and pointed out that he loved restaurants.
Ok, so he didn't exactly ask his uncle. But he still got the advice. Relying on serendipity doesn't seem like an actionable plan to me.
I didn't do this until much, much later. I waited maybe ten years longer than I should have to start asking other people what they thought I liked. Because I learned that how other people perceive you is how you actually are in the world, and what they perceive you to like is what you're demonstrating to them that you like (whether it's true or not).
When I started asking this question, I was astounded by the answers. It pointed me in whole new directions of things to learn about. Right now, I'm learning everything I can about parenting, because I really like being a dad. I didn't think it would have any application in the business world... but then it turns out that the same psychology that motivates my toddler also motivates some people I work with. So it's made me a bit better as a manager, and helped me to get out of my own head some.
I don't know if this exercise in asking takes you away from your job in translation. It might just enrich it - you might just be hitting a lull in your career. Or it might point the way for you to use your skills in translation to learn something else entirely. All I know is that it makes the path a heck of a lot clearer than stumbling around in the dark.
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