I’ve learned more career lessons from my DIY house projects than anything else. Nothing will test you more than doing hard manual labor that has permanent consequences on your biggest investment, lol. Just like your career, your home investment spans decades and has a huge sunk cost. Here are the career lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Before I started my 5-year journey of designing and fixing up my house, I was pretty impatient and perfectionistic. Using power tools on my own home worked to grind out both of those tendencies.
Perfectionism was a tough one because all the DIY Instagram accounts make everything look so easy, fast, and…perfect. But yea, if you look closely, I’m sure something is not perfect because getting into these projects: there are so many dynamics, skills to learn, specialty tools to buy.
Also, it’s Saturday morning after working all week and you don’t want to spend 3 hours trying to find the right chisel at Home Depot, so you make concessions.
I’ve really leaned into, “this is good enough,” because every house is imperfect and you have to roll with the wonky corners, sloped floors, and odd choices of previous owners. It’s literally impossible to make it perfect!
My goal shifted to making sure the design felt right. So when I chose to paint the doors in my office a flamingo pink: I focused on whether it was the right color/energy for the room and ignored the drips here and there that inevitably happen when painting.
What are the career lessons here?
No job is perfect, ever.
But does this job fit your life today? Does it meet the financial needs you have right now? And, is it the energy right for you?
Is this job “good enough” right now? Every job will disappoint you in some way because offices are run by people and people are flawed.
But if you do the introspective work to know exactly what you want + need in a job and then make sure this opportunity has that alignment, then you will be satisfied in your new job and retain.
We do this deep work in Dream Job Coaching, which is why 100% of my clients retain in their new jobs. Now, I’m building even more in-depth reflection and analysis tools to help you pinpoint exactly the right job for you.
My new reports shine a mirror on what you really want in your job and then lay out exactly how to show up as your authentic self to land that job AND shine in your first 90 days. I’m so excited to offer these sophisticated reports to help my clients gain career clarity, plus the exact messaging they need to help them express their secret sauce of brilliance.
By taking the time to identify a) what you really want in a job, and b) what you’re really good at: you can land a job that fits your full life right now.
As with the career lessons from DIY, it may still have drips of paint or a corner that could be sanded down a bit more, but this job is the right energy for your life and is “good enough.”
“Good enough” is powerful framing because it forces you to name the top priorities of this job (maybe it’s salary or work/life balance or managing a team or positive team culture) and assess whether this job meets your most important criteria.
When I stopped chasing perfection, I became a lot more satisfied with the end result of my projects. The same can be said for my career: there was never going to be that golden job that I loved waking up to go to each and every day. When I leaned to into the career lessons that every job is imperfect, I became more satisfied with the job I had (especially since I negotiated a top salary when I took the job, which also helps you deal with disappointment!)
It took a lot of DIY project restarts, pivots, and re-dos to reshape my relationship with perfection, but the impact is far reaching. I hope we can all stop chasing perfection and create a career that fits the most important criteria for our lives right now and not add on pressure that it has to be 100% everything you need in your life.
Next, I’ll share about the harder lesson I learned: impatience (lol)
