Shelley Young argues that job dissatisfaction is baked into the hourly employment model: you trade time for money, so better performance just means more work, not more pay. She switched to a sales role where her paycheck tied directly to results, which broke that ceiling and changed everything.
I spent such a long time trying to fix a job that was never going to make me happy, and I did all the normal things to make it happen: change teams, change companies, ask for more money. And every single time, it worked for around 6 weeks, and then I felt exactly the same. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why, and it's not that I was ungrateful or that my job was bad or that I picked the wrong industry. It It was so much more simple than that, and once you see it, you literally can't unsee it. So I want to show you the thing that was actually happening because it was the reason none of these fixes actually worked, and it was the reason the next one will not work either. There are three things we can all try when a job stops working, and I've literally tried every single one of them. The first is that you change the team: new manager, new department, sideways move, right? You tell yourself it's the people because the people are the bit that. that you can actually see. The people are the bit that you surround yourself with on a daily basis. The second is that you change the company. Same job, different logo, basically. And you do it for about a month, and it genuinely feels better because everything is new, everything is shiny, and no one has annoyed you yet. And the third is that you ask for more money. This is the one that everyone thinks is the real answer, and it's the one I want to spend the most time on because it's the one that literally fooled me for the longest time. So if you've ever done one of these things in the last 2 years, you're not doing anything wrong. Those are the 3 doors that you can actually see from where you're standing. So you're actually trying, and kudos for you for actually trying to make a change and actually better your situation. But I don't know about you, every fix changed the number on my payslip, but not one of them changed the trade underneath it. Here's what I mean by trade. You give them your hours, they give you money. That is the deal. Now, this is a completely fine deal. The majority of the world is in this deal, right? But let's actually look at what these 3 fixes actually does. A new team changes who you spend your hours with, right? A new company changes where you spend them, and a pay rise changes the hours that you're actually worth. Who, where, how much? Not one of them actually touches the fact you are still selling those hours and that you only have a fixed number of them and that you are already spending nearly all of them. That is why the novelty wears off every single time. I kept on redecorating a room instead of noticing the room was literally the problem. You are not paid for your work. You're paid for your hours, and there are only so many hours you actually have in a day. And I really want you to sit with that because it sounds obvious, but it's not. If you are brilliant at your job, like genuinely brilliant, and you do in 4 hours what takes someone else to do in 8, you do not get paid double. Instead, you get given more work. And that is not your company being evil. That is just what the deal is. You sold hours, they brought hours. It's as simple as that. So when you think about it, being better at your job can't make you more money inside of that deal. It can move you up the ladder slowly, and moving up that ladder is of course worth a few thousand a year. But let's be real, it comes with more hours, more responsibilities, and more pressure that no one's actually going to mention in that offer. But then there's a ceiling, and you can't really surpass the ceiling because it's not a hard work ceiling. It's an hour ceiling, and you only have so many hours in the week, and you're already selling most of them. And that is the thing I could not see for years. I was desperately just trying to find a nannying job that would pay me more for my hours, but I literally had it all wrong. And once I saw it, I stopped being angry at my job because it was literally doing everything it said it would do. And that was the only thing that ever actually moved the needle forward for me. What I was being paid for Not how much. I had a car in the garage with a £6,000 car bill on it, and I had no idea how I was going to pay it. And that situation made me apply for something completely different, a completely new way of doing things. And I'm going to be honest, that was out of pure pressure, not courage. I was actually petrified trying something for the first time that was not in that quote-unquote norm. But anyway, I applied for a job that I was not qualified for, and I was competing against 150 applicants, most of them who were qualified for it. I literally had no sales experience at all when I applied for this sales role. And what I said in the interview was, look, I don't have the most experience here, but I will be the hardest worker. I will be the first one in and the last one out. And that whole pitch allowed me to get hired on the spot because I was desperate to find a job where my hard work directly correlated with what I was being paid because I was such a hard worker. But what made me feel lazy is that if I worked hard, I wouldn't get paid more anyway, so I didn't apply myself. But this was different. My first paycheck was £900, right? Not a success story yet, nothing crazy, but it was the bottom of a completely new ladder, a completely new world. It was the first money that I'd ever received based on effort and dedication and building a skill set rather than just turning up. And that change completely transformed everything for me. So if you've been jumping job to job hoping to fix the job, just stop. Not quit, but just stop trying to fix. There is a difference, and it matters, because fixing is where all of your energy goes, and that energy you need to actually make a change. The question is not, how do I make my job better? You've answered that one 3 times now. The question is, what do I have to do to be paid for my effort, not my hours? That sum is a completely different equation. For me, it turned out to be a skill I could get paid a percentage on. So the harder I worked, the more I got paid, and I loved that. And the hours stopped being a thing that was That was the whole reason I'm literally sat here today. And look, you do not have to do what I did. You just have to notice that what you've been trying to fix is the wrong half of the sum, and no amount of loyalty or effort or asking nicely is going to change the half that you have been working towards.
