| I've spent the majority of my career feeling this way, OP, hopping jobs and feeling like a crazy person. I've left plum gigs at coveted companies; I've passed on opportunities that would have made me rich (could I have stuck with it). I've read and studied a ton of things to try to deal with it. At a high level, this article summarizes my angst. Maybe you'll benefit from it. It's about moving into management, but the ideas of deliverables and contributions might help you understand some things about you. "I no longer operated in my personal sweet spot, where my sense of accomplishment after closing a difficult sale or launching a new product was contingent on my having had a concrete deliverable and the sense that my efforts were integral to its success. Being a manager caused me to feel disconnected from what career analyst Daniel Pink has identified as the three primary motivators of behavior: autonomy, mastery and purpose. I had little autonomy, little interest in gaining mastery as a manager (in spite of myriad coaches), and felt dissociated from my true self." https://hbr.org/2012/12/what-if-you-dont-want-to-be-a When I evaluate the jobs I've loved or hated using autonomy, mastery, and purpose, I can clearly see why I've loved or hated them. We'll all fall in different places on those three scales; what's right for me won't be right for you. But I need high levels of all three (and mastery is the really tricky one) or the job will slide towards the hated end of the continuum. Some of the many great books that have shaped my thinking:
So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport
Deep Work, Cal Newport
Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford
(that last one, watch out. you might never go back to work. But the chapter called "The Contradictions of the Cubicle" speaks volumes to me). There are many others, but I got the most benefit out of those three. Hope this is helpful in some way. |