Job happiness: sixty seconds’ worth of distance run

What you see here is a picture of my brother: he would have turned 50 last month. It is also a picture of a piece of technology – Vision AI – that has become quintessential in my professional life. That technology will also impact your life in more ways than you can imagine – it might even save it someday.

This picture represents the essence of the choices I've made over the last 2 years. I decided to share it after the few people I’ve told it found it helpful when they were at a crossroad in their professional life. Maybe you will too.

He was my kid brother and would have turned 50 on April 1 (yeah, really). He didn't make it that far: he died last month one year ago. He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer on Christmas evening 2020. There was no hope for a cure: the cancer had spread too far. The oncologist gave him 5 months; he stretched it to a year and a half. Mostly because he preferred to spend the finale of his life in agonising pain over an easier and faster death.

Hearing the diagnosis of my brother was the single hardest thing I’ve ever had to face. To this day, I can’t imagine how it must have felt for him. I can tell you however what it did for me. And guess what: it taught me a lot about happiness. If you find yourself struggling with that, you may want to read on.

Happiness is sixty seconds’ worth of distance run

I learnt this when I lost a friend eight years ago. We were in a bar, downing cocktails and telling each other things we hadn’t told other souls. He would have really risky brain surgery 2 or 3 days after and it could well have been the last time we saw each other. The most beautiful thing he told me that night was: “If I don’t wake up from the operation, I’m still happy with what I’ve gotten out of it so far. Man, I love my life so much.”

However, the contradiction puzzled me: how can you be so happy with your life and at the same time don’t mind dying that much? The answer lies in Kipling’s last line from his famous poem ‘If’:

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute

????With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,???

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,???

????And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

My friend had mastered the art of filling most minutes of his life with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. He lived a full life. (He survived the operation but died suddenly a couple of weeks after the doctor had declared him cured. I take great consolation in the fact that he was happy until the very end.)

When I heard the news about my brother, at some point I wondered: “What if it had been me?” Would I have been okay with it, like my friend? Was every minute of my life filled with these sixty seconds worth running?

Truth be told: far from it. I felt that the last couple of years, most of the work I did felt like a drag. It was time to fix that.

Professional happiness is 3 dimensional

I started reading about happiness for the first time in my life. Not so long ago, that very idea would have sounded ridiculous to me: happiness is easy, right??

It’s having laughs with friends and loved ones at a lake in Piemonté, with a bottle of Sangiovese. It’s a bike ride in the Pyrenees, when you rise above the clouds and you feel on top of the world, your heart pounding hard in your chest and it feels like you are getting high on oxygen. It’s when her and my eyes meet during a concert and we are struck by the same chord and for a moment everything is in perfect harmony.

Yes, those moments are pure bliss and I cherish every second of them deeply.

But like it or not: people in Belgium spend on average 217 days per year working. If you sleep 8 hours a day, half of your day is spent at work. If you want a shot at a happy life, you need to be happy at work. I hadn't been happy at work for a while. And really: I had enjoyed work for most of my life. So what had changed?

Here is what the literature tells you. There are different theories and models out there, but most of it boils down to 3 different dimensions that make up professional happiness.

1. Self-realisation

The first one is the actual pleasure you take in what you do. This in itself has to do with self-realisation. You explore your talents and get the most out of them. The most obvious examples of this are athletes or performers. They are basically people who turned their hobby into their job, they are the embodiment of the saying that “If you like what you do, you don’t need to work a day in your life.”

Self-realisation also has the benefit that you tend to become really good at what you like to do. That gives you an edge in the often competitive professional market.

2. Recognition

The second one is the recognition you get for your work. Do people appreciate your work, do they applaud you, do you get awarded for it? Again, for performers and athletes this becomes very tangible: imagine the sheer kick you would get from a stadium full of fans cheering for you. In a more regular workplace context, this translates to the occasional pat on the back, industry awards maybe, the respect you get from your peers.

Note: the financial compensation is also part of this reward, but guess what: the amount is less important than you might think.

3. Impact

Finally, you want your job to have a positive impact, to be meaningful. Think of doctors saving lives, volunteering for charitable organisations, scientists enabling space travel. In my experience, companies who contribute little to society (or worse: they do actual damage to it) compensate for this with huge financial benefits. It’s why big oil, tobacco, gambling etc. pay really well. It’s also why people decide to work for free for good causes. Also from my personal experience: this becomes more important as you grow older.

Staring in the mirror

It shouldn’t take you too long to assess your professional happiness on these 3 dimensions. If your work is varied, like mine was, break it down in hours for your typical working week. Look at your calendar and count the hours that you’re looking forward to. Count the hours you dread. If there are more hours you dread than you like, you need to change things.

I found that more than half of my calendar was filled with things I didn’t like. Lots of them were what you would call managerial tasks, which boil down to managing means and timings. I have friends I deeply admire who are good at this. But it drains the energy out of me.

I also learnt that the things that gave me a boost, could be divided into two categories: strategy and creation. Which was basically what I did in the first decade of my career. So how had I gotten to the place where I found myself now?

The answer is again fairly simple if you keep the 3 dimensions in mind.

I was good at what I did, so I got promoted. To this day, I remember how I called my mother to tell her I had become a Creative Director at BBDO in my third year in advertising, and she almost cried with pride. And yes, advertising is really good at recognition: the award industry in advertising is second to only the movie industry. I know creatives who would give up a limb for a Golden Lion at the Cannes Festival.

So I had gradually prioritised Recognition, the second dimension, over self-realisation and impact. Simply put: I had fallen in love with the prestige of job titles that ended with ‘Director’ or started with ‘Head of’. And yes, the pay agreed with me as well. But I wasn’t creating anymore, I was managing creatives and trying to please clients. And it got worse with the choices I made afterwards.

It was now time to rethink my choices.

Resetting yourself

So far for the theory. Now the hard part: putting it into practice.?Changing things in your life.

The conclusions for me were pretty clear:?

• I wanted to be busy creating again, at least half of my time. To make it very concrete: I wanted to write.
• I wanted my job to have a positive impact on the world.
• I was prepared to take a pay-cut.

When the conclusions were clear to me I sat down with my wife to ask her if she was okay with me quitting my managerial job at an awesome branding agency and start looking for a job as a copywriter. Since I had never held that position before, it was a gamble. My wife was very supportive and we decided to give it a try for one year.

Today I am writing for an AI company that is doing incredible things in agriculture and healthcare. Our engineers are enabling breakthroughs in important fields like food production, oncology and radiology. I have high hopes that evolutions in the field of Vision AI may help coming up with more accurate diagnoses and thus prevent the death of people like my brother.

Next, I’ve also taken up a teacher job at Thomas More . It feels really rewarding to share your knowledge with 80 eager minds from all over the world in the field of media and communication strategy.?I try to be the teacher that I wanted to have when I sat in their seats.

The rest of my time is spent at my own branding agency where I still get to do strategic work for my own clients I’ve acquired over the years: I love them all and am grateful for their continued trust in me.

Today I find myself happy at work again most of the time.

You could be too. Just don't wait for somebody to die to realise that.