Choose a career you can sustain without burning out

Start With The Real Question

Every job posting promises an upgrade, so the default question becomes which option shines brighter on paper. The wiser question is which work we can keep doing joyfully even on a rainy Monday.

That tension fills reader emails: should you stay in front-end or move to back-end, jump into fintech or ecommerce, leave a steady enterprise role for a volatile startup? Different scenarios, same fear—we might copy someone else's highlight reel while overlooking the daily reality.

To sidestep that trap, borrow Adam Mastroianni's lens from "Face it: you're a crazy person." He argues that sustainable work demands an audit of the entire job ledger, not just the glossy headings. Once we adopt that audit lens, our stock career narratives start to show their cracks.

Look Beyond Familiar Narratives

Viewed through that audit lens, the stories we grew up hearing look one-dimensional. Commencement speeches urge us to "find what you love," with Steve Jobs as the emblem that passion will steer us. The sentiment matters, yet passion on its own ignores the chores welded to every role.

Scroll through forums such as Blind and a second story appears: compensation becomes the master scoreboard. Salary, bonus, and stock collapse into a single number, tempting us to judge careers purely by their financial leaderboards while skipping the lived experience of earning them.

Then there's the viral IKIGAI diagram overlapping what we enjoy, what we do well, what the world needs, and what pays. It is a beautiful picture, but every circle conceals tedious tasks we rarely mention. Mastroianni's lens tells us those omissions aren't cosmetic—they are exactly the details we must study before choosing our path.

Surface The Hidden Tasks

Follow that lens backstage and the hidden tasks materialize quickly. Picture the friend who dreams of quitting to run a coffee shop. We imagine latte art and playlists, but who negotiates bean shipments or handles a supplier delay at dawn?

Operating the shop means tracking ingredient costs, scheduling staff, cleaning equipment, and balancing inventory systems. The day-to-day looks less like sipping espresso and more like running a miniature logistics company.

Once you see that pattern, it shows up everywhere. Creators dive into video work for the thrill of designing stories, then discover the grind of editing revisions, replying to sponsors, and managing production calendars. Engineers relocate to Japan for the adventure of a new culture and tech scene, yet still chase visas, wrangle city paperwork, and pick up late-night on-call shifts while their old team sleeps.

The fantasy keeps shrinking until those gritty components are in plain view alongside the rewards. Naming both is the prework that lets us test whether any piece, against the odds, might feel energizing to us.

Find Work That Feels Like Play To You

In that essay, Mastroianni jokes that the people who keep loving their work after seeing all the mess are "crazy." A kinder interpretation is that they are deeply aligned—they enjoy the pieces most people dodge.

Think about a surgeon who repeats similar procedures for decades or a teacher who revisits the same syllabus every fall. Many would find that monotony maddening, yet the aligned professional treats it like tuning a favorite instrument.

When a task that exhausts most people feels neutral—or even energizing—to us, we gain a compounding edge. Every repetition grows our craft instead of draining our spirit, and that feeling becomes the signal that the audit paid off—we found an arena built for us. That signal sets up the practical experiments that come next.

Test Your Fit Before You Leap

Armed with that signal, Mastroianni's lens nudges us to validate the fit before we burn the ships. Start by interviewing people already living the job and ask about their worst Tuesday, not just their best launch day.

Then run small experiments that mimic those Tuesdays: shadow someone for a week, volunteer for the dull paperwork, or prototype the workflow on a side project. Each trial shows whether the supposedly tedious tasks feel tolerable or secretly fun.

Career clarity comes from honest reps, not perfect certainty. Keep iterating, collect the data, and treat each decision as a draft you can refine before it hardens into a long-term path that truly fits.

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