The mind loves reducing things to all or nothing, binary situations. I've previously fallen into the mistake of trying to decide if I was "happy" or "not happy" with my work.
In reality, there are so many dimensions to your career, the real difficulty when you're not happy, is how to go about figuring our why in a systematic way.
The Five-Salaries Framework
I recently came across Calvin Rosser's five salary framework which I think is an excellent mental model for debugging your career.
The core idea is each job actually pays you not one, but five salaries, these are:
- Financial - Salary, Equity, Benefits
- Psychological - Meaning and connection to the work
- Social - Prestige, Professional identity, Belonging with peers
- Educational - Skills, Specific Knowledge, Relationships
- Freedom - Autonomy of when, where and what to work on.
With this framework I was able to understand how my current career choices could fit together and complement each other. Working at a startup paid me handsomely in freedom in a way that being a surgical resident didn't.
I also realized I typically over-index on financial salary when evaluating future career options, whilst undervaluing things like autonomy or freedom. That being said, how you prioritize these will and should change depending on which phase of your life you're at.
Without frameworks like these, Its easy to forget to see the forest for the trees. You can fixate on the one dimension that's not working in your career, and forget that you can do things to fix it (like start a side-hustle or tweak your role).
Most career decisions are trade-offs, and it's not always possible to optimise for everything. Making clear what those trade-offs are, is a great way to start to debug your career.
My current five-salaries assessment
Some interesting things to note
- What i'm not paid for in freedom in my structured, resident job, i'm paid for in my startup role.
- When I was a medical student, I was paid handsomely in freedom. Looking back I wish I understood this more and "spent" it a bit better.
- I went from "Oxford Academic Job" to "Ophthalmology" - and the big change in how much freedom I felt I had was difficult to deal with at first. I should have seen it coming and learnt to deal with it better.
Calvin Rosser explores this idea more on his twitter --> Link.