It's Just That Work Got Harder.
📖 We Can Still Become Anything_Kim Jinyoung
3-6-9
Just like life has its unlucky years, there are turning points in one’s career that supposedly come every 3 years — hence the talk of 3-6-9 year milestones.
Having passed 6 years and entering my 7th, I too have been thinking a lot about the direction of my career since last year.
The first 3 years were far from a turning point — shedding my newbie skin with boldness and high self-confidence,
I fearlessly took on challenges, and luck being on my side, I achieved good results and enjoyed a career filled with recognition. After 5 years of the same work, I raised my hand and volunteered for new challenges. The environment changed drastically, and after a series of events, the feeling of not getting the same recognition and results as before shrank my self-confidence, and I often find myself struggling.
I finally read
📝 Thoughts and sentences I loved
pg.14
Whether the flame of my working heart has truly been ‘extinguished,’ why it went out, how to light it again, what to make of this extinguished state, whether this time will pass, whether I can get better, and what ‘getting better’ even means — from what to what.
pg.39
“The problem isn’t pouring too much meaning into work and identifying yourself with it. It’s about what aspect of work you give meaning to, and what aspect of work you identify yourself with. (omitted) Believe that even without this particular job, you can find meaningful work elsewhere; don’t mistake the success or failure of your work for your own value.” — Je Hyunju,
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I realized from this book that a working person needs many kinds of balance. Balance between work and life, between what you love and what you’re good at, between what you want to do and what you must do, between working alone and working together, between striving hard and coasting. These balances create the physical and mental health needed to do what you love for a long time.
pg.45
The closer the gap between work and life, the more I suffered from the optical illusion that my life was crumbling when it was merely that work had gotten harder. I felt free when I stepped away from work and realized that the world I stood on, the world that made me up, was quite solid.
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pg.51
Even as the years pile up and work is no longer an event but a daily routine, there are moments when some switch flickers on and what I do suddenly feels special again. Switches that bring back the air of my first day at work, the memory of the first time I felt I could be good at this, the feeling of the day I first thought I could do this for life. When your heart is healthy, it’s good to create many of your own switches. Even so, burnout is the time when none of it helps. For me, the drama
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It’s effective to stack sentences or words of comfort from others that help restore your first love for work in a small notebook. Comfort has quite a long lifespan — when you revisit it after time has passed, the emotions you felt then come alive again.
pg.57
I read somewhere that the concept of work should include both working time and rest time. Through my gap year, I learned how to let myself rest, and I started to feel like I could work again. Thanks to that, I could think about a sustainable working life.
pg.112
In Korea, whether it’s work, exercise, or studying, we’re taught to ‘do better, push past your limits.’ But in yoga, when a pose isn’t working, they say, “How long have you been doing this pose? It’s completely natural that you can’t do it yet. You need to accept the version of yourself that can’t do it.”
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As my career progressed, I thought I couldn’t afford to make mistakes or fail. Tensing up to avoid falling meant that when I did fall, the injuries were worse. Only after getting hurt did I realize: a person who’s fallen many times — their edge and pride isn’t in never falling again. It’s in the skill of falling well, the resilience to dust yourself off and stand back up quickly.
pg.127
But I couldn’t give up the ultimate goal I’d harbored since before starting my career and throughout my entire working life. For a while, I worked pretending not to see that achieving that goal had become impossible. I worked without a goal, without a target.
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pg.166
A term I discovered in
pg.183
Looking back, I don’t think I worked at 100 percent every single day and hour at the company. Back then, if I just pushed through the month, my salary would come in reliably on the set date. Now it’s different. If I don’t do something, it becomes zero. Whether it’s income or the meaning of time. Sometimes my husband and I joke: are we slowly floating downstream on a raft? While our friends keep getting promoted, their salaries going up, buying houses. We love our freedom right now, but sometimes we suddenly get scared — what if we’re actually drifting away?
pg.185
Even when I quit, I chose the gap year because I had regrets about growth. And the reason I’d return to an organization after the gap year would also be about unfulfilled growth. When I feel I need more growth within an organization, I’ll go back. Right now, growing my expertise as a YouTuber is fun, but I often feel the limits of being an ordinary individual. There seem to be limits to the relationships and work you can experience as an individual not belonging to an organization, and unless I constantly try really, really hard, those limits will never expand.
pg.201
To focus more on what I’m good at, I had to distinguish between what I’m truly good at, what I want to be good at, and what I’d mistakenly thought I would be good at.
pg.213
There’s inspiration and energy that can only be gained by stepping away from the context that always surrounds me and seeing myself and the world with fresh senses. Not inspiration from others or from contexts society has already created, but inspiration that arises purely from myself. Such inspiration and energy become seeds of self-esteem and self-assurance.
pg.239
I often feel a tinge of depression, feeling like my energy and abilities have declined compared to my past self who worked with burning passion. Can I never recover?
“It’s not that your self-esteem has dropped — your body and thoughts have shifted in a direction that protects you. If your energy, focus, and sharpness aren’t what they used to be, something else must surely have filled that space. I sometimes think about my passionate past self too and wonder ‘Is it really okay to live like this?’ But it is okay to live like this.” I found myself frequently reading the counselor’s words that I’d written in my notebook.
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pg.244
When worried about work, thinking about the essential part of what you love about your work is the most important thing. As your career grows, good moments and tough moments at work both multiply, and through all these layers, it’s easy to forget what you love most about your work. Simply refreshing that cherished feeling can strip away all the peripheral elements and take you straight to the essence. And reconfirming the essence of what you love about your work helps you reset your target. This entire gap year process of recalibrating work and life to reset your work’s target is, in truth, all so that you can joyfully do what you love for a long time to come.
pg.246
Most of us don’t just want to ‘do’ the work we love — we want to do it ‘sustainably.’ And burnout can hit when that sustainability is in doubt or when we face an unsustainable situation. To reset your work’s target through work-life recalibration, you need to identify what makes your beloved work ‘sustainable.’ And the elements that let your past self enjoy work might be different from the current ones. Even if you face elements that make you embarrassed or disappointed in yourself, let’s be as honest and desperately reflective as possible.
pg.249
After all, what we need isn’t new stimulation — it’s the refreshing of the senses that once made us joyfully do what we love.