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Three Signs You’re Stuck
A career ceiling is when you get stuck and it can happen a couple different ways. It can be the 70% of Americans who, according to Gallup, don’t like their jobs, but don’t do anything about it. They’ve just kind of accepted that a job is just a job. This is what I do for their rest of my life. We eat at TGI Fridays, not TGI Mondays for a reason. The Office was a popular show for a reason. Dilbert books sold a lot for a reason, because we get stuck. For me, that was climbing to the top of a career ladder. Maybe that’s something you relate to. I was 32 years old and I worked at Autotrader and I had a great job, but I was a senior content designer and there was no super duper senior content designer position above that. I’d come to the end of that ladder.
At 32, that was overwhelming to think, “Okay, my career ball has already stopped rolling, and this is where I am.” You know you’ve hit a ceiling when you feel Monday on Sunday, the sense of just repetition over and over again, when it’s Sunday at noon, you could already feel Monday, that Monday’s creeping into your weekend. You know you’ve hit a ceiling where you have a career that owns your weekdays and haunts your weekends. You see that happen a lot where people can’t even really enjoy vacation. If you’ve ever had that feeling where you go on a week-long vacation and right at the last day, you finally have that sense of, “Okay, I can do this,” and the next day your vacation’s over and you go back to work and you stand wistfully in the break room and kind of look out the window with a sad cup of coffee and think, “I was free once, and it was yesterday.”
You know when you’ve hit a ceiling or you’re not growing, you’re not being challenged at work. That there’s a large part of you that’s not getting to enter the building. If you’ve got, say 10 different skills, 10 thing you’re good at, and you get to do one of them at work, and 90% of you, the best parts of you have to get left at home, then there’s a chance you’re in a ceiling. The other way you know, is if your industry starts leaving you behind. If you’re a graphic designer, for instance, I meet a lot of graphic designers and they tell me, “Jon, I remember in college, there was a time where I could take an online design class for fun as an elective. Then one day I woke up and if I didn’t know how to design for the internet, I was a dinosaur and the industry had changed.”
A lot of times, you know you’ve hit a ceiling when your industry is changing and there’s new technologies or new things you need to know how to do, and you’re not learning those. You’re trying to protect the old way, and meanwhile, the industry is going, “These are the things that matter. These are the new currencies.” Those are signs that you’ve hit a ceiling.
Companies get stuck too. They hit ceilings. I read a great article in the New York Times that asked why didn’t Kodak could create Instagram? Why didn’t Polaroid create Instagram? Of all the people that should have understood our love affair with photography, why did they miss it? What happens for our company is that you start with innovation and risk, but then when things go well, you tend to move from innovation mode to protection mode, and you start to protect the things you’ve already built. Nobody could walk into Kodak and say, I have an idea for an app and it won’t make any money, but at the end of two years, it’ll be worth a billion dollars, so they got stuck.
Industries get stuck too. I spoke to a group of orthodontists and to be an amazing orthodontist right now, you have to be good at social media, email marketing and running a business. Do you know what they don’t teach at orthodontics school? Social media, email marketing, and running a business.
Empowering Yourself
The best way to break through a career ceiling is to one, admit you’re in one and say, “Okay, wait a second. I’m stuck. Here’s where I’m am, and here’s how I got there.” I think it’s really important for us to recognize how we got there, so we don’t get to another one quickly. I can say, “Okay, I thought this job was going to be this and it wasn’t, or I thought the things I needed to know were this and they weren’t. Now, I have this invitation to learn some new things.” In that moment, when you hit a ceiling, what you need most is your skills. It’s impossible to get stuck somewhere old, if you keep learning something new. A set of skills that you can say, “Okay, I got stuck. But in order to get out of this moment, I have to learn my way out of this moment. I have to develop new tools, new techniques, new opportunities,” and they’re going to come from your ability to add some new tools to your toolbox.
When you hit a ceiling, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It can actually be a laboratory for you to get better. It can actually be the gym. Hitting a ceiling is leg day. Nobody likes leg day, but it’s your chance to separate yourself from all the other people that aren’t going to put in the work that aren’t going to develop the new skills. I think about an industrial designer my friend worked with and he hit a ceiling moment. He was amazing at sketching things by hand, amazing at it, but his company said, “We need you to learn AutoCAD. AutoCAD is where we’re headed.” For a while, he fought it and said, “I’m faster. I can write these amazing sketches with hand,” but eventually he lost that and he lost his job.
When you hit a ceiling, you have a choice. You can change it. You can work on your skills, or you can stay stuck and eventually lose your position, lose your relevancy. Every industry is always changing and you get to be part of that change if you’ll develop new skills, or if you won’t, you get stuck and you get left behind, and you just do repetitive things over and over and over again. Here’s the thing you need to know when you’re stuck. Here’s the most important thing. It’s not your company’s job for you to have a good job. It’s your job to have a good job. Sometimes when you’re stuck, you have to say, “Am I blaming other people right now? Like, if I’m being honest, am I blaming my boss? Am I blaming the economy? Am I blaming coworkers? There’s is there a list of people that I’m saying, ‘You have the power, because you put me in this situation.’” If there is, you might have to have that hard conversation.
That’s why we need friends in our life that’ll help us see that. Because if I promise you, if you say, “I think I’ve been really giving my boss a lot of power they don’t really have, or the economy a lot of power,” because the reality is the economy will never be good enough for you to make a jump. It will never be safe enough. It will never be perfect enough. I think if you said to a friend, “Hey, I think I’m stuck because I’ve been giving my boss a lot of power they don’t have,” an honest friend might go, “I wanted to tell you that six months ago, but I didn’t know how.” I think you have to develop new skills, have honest conversations and remember above all a good job is your job, not your job’s job.