You don't have to quit to find your footing
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This week, a lot of people are talking about happiness at work. Most of that conversation only offers two doors: love what you do, or leave what you do. Say you're somewhere in between, and there's nothing written for you.
Some people do love their work. That's real, and this isn't here to talk them out of it. But most of the conversations I have aren't with people deciding whether to quit. They're with people trying to figure out where they even stand, in a job that isn't wrong exactly, but isn't the whole answer either.
There's another way to think about this, and it doesn't ask you to pick a door at all. It splits into two paths instead, and neither one requires you to leave right away.
Footing inside the job
Before you look anywhere else, it's worth asking a smaller, more honest question than "am I happy here." Ask this instead: on the worst week, what's the one part of this job you still don't resent doing.
Not the part you're supposed to be grateful for. Not the free snacks, not the flexible hours, not the line you'd put on a LinkedIn post. The actual thing. Maybe it's the two people you trust. Maybe it's the one project where you still lose track of time. Maybe it's just that the work itself, on a good day, still fits how your brain likes to work.
That's not nothing. That's footing, and it's closer to actual happiness at work than either side of the love it or leave it framing gives credit for. It doesn't mean the job is perfect. It means you've found a place to stand inside it instead of just enduring it.
Footing built alongside the job
The other path doesn't happen inside the job at all. It happens beside it.
I think a lot of people are quietly doing this without giving it a name. Using the stability of a paycheck, a schedule, a known set of walls, to build the space to figure out what else might be true for them. Not as an escape plan. As a floor. Something steady enough to build from while the rest gets figured out slowly, without the pressure of it having to work immediately.
This one takes longer to feel like anything. There's no single day where it clicks. You just look up at some point and realize the stable thing gave you room to build the other thing, and that room mattered more than either one on its own. This kind of happiness doesn't come from the job itself. It comes from knowing your whole life doesn't have to live inside it.
This part doesn't resolve in one blog post, and it isn't supposed to. If you're in the middle of building something alongside the job, that's slow work by nature, and it's most of what the YouTube channel actually is. Not a highlight reel of what's finished, the actual building, week by week, documented as it happens instead of announced after the fact. Follow along here.
Footing isn't a decision. It's a practice.
These two paths aren't a fork in the road, and you don't have to choose between them. You can be building footing exactly where you are while also building something quietly beside it, at the same time, and doing one doesn't disqualify you from the other.
The real mistake is waiting to feel sorted before you let yourself move. Moving before everything's decided is the right call more often than not, but it doesn't automatically make you feel steady. Sometimes it won't, and that's not a sign you did it wrong. Steady isn't the requirement for moving. It's what eventually builds from having moved anyway.
One small shift, not a system
At the end of this week, answer whichever one is actually true for you right now. One part of your job you'd keep if you were designing it from scratch. Or one thing you're building, even quietly, alongside it. If both are true, name both. If only one is, that's enough.
That's it. Not a plan, not a five-year roadmap. Just naming what's actually there instead of letting it blur into the same undifferentiated week.
That's closer to what page one of the Open Day Workbook actually asks of you than any of the busier pages after it. Not more to do. Just something to notice.
every day. on purpose. 🖊️
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