Your favourite song might not actually be that good
Readtime: 2.5 minutes
Think about your favourite song. Do you love it because it's genuinely great – or because you've heard it 500 times?
Now ask the same question about your job.
If your job appeared on a playlist you'd never heard before, would you choose to listen – or would you skip to the next track?
There's a well-documented phenomenon in psychology called the Mere Exposure Effect. This says that the more you're exposed to something, the more you tend to like it. It works for music. It works for food and faces and brands. And I suspect it works for our careers too.
Which means that some of what we think of as job satisfaction might actually just be familiarity. The comfort of something you've done a thousand times before, feeling a lot like contentment.
And then when you're good at something, it also feels rewarding. You get positive feedback. You're efficient. Things come easily. And that feels good. But "I enjoy this" and "I'm good at this and being good at things feels nice" are not the same thing.
I can say this from experience. I spent 22 years at KPMG and built a pretty successful career – Partner, on the leadership team for a large part of the firm, major clients. I was good at the things I needed to be good at in order to get there. And I definitely enjoyed a lot of my time.
But when I look back honestly, I think what I enjoyed the most wasn't the core work I was delivering to clients. It was the stuff around it – developing my teams, building client relationships, and shaping how the firm was run. These were the surround activities, not the main event.
I'm not sure I fully saw that at the time, because I was good at the core work and being good at it felt like enjoying it. It took stepping away to realise that the parts I missed the most were never the main parts I was paid to do.
Now, I want to be careful here. Because I don't think this is necessarily a problem.
Building a career around what you're good at is not a bad thing. Many people would be grateful for it. Plenty of people build careers around something they're not particularly good at and don't know what else to do. So if you've found something you're competent at, that people value, that pays well – that's a fortunate position.
But I do think it's worth knowing whether you're where you are by choice or just because that's where you've ended up. Even if you stay exactly where you are, I think that awareness changes something.
Because there's a difference between comfort and fulfilment. Not dreading Monday, but not really looking forward to it either. That middle zone where things are fine, where you're good at your job, where everything ticks along. Nothing actively wrong. But nothing to really complain about either.
But "nothing is wrong" is not quite the same as "this is right".
Imagine you left your role tomorrow. What would you actually miss? The work itself – or everything else? The identity, the status, the social connections, the familiarity of knowing exactly what's expected of you. I think we underestimate how much that last one in particular is worth to us. There's a real pull in better the devil you know.
I don't have a neat answer to this. I'm still thinking it through myself. But I do wonder whether sometimes you need to hear a new song to realise you've been listening to the same one on repeat.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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