Mr Freaking Furious

Thriving at work is a choice, not an accident

At a conference in 2006, a man walked up to me, pinned me to the wall and began spitting venom and hate about his job. Not his afternoon. His working life. He hated his job, his industry, his company, his boss, his team mates; I got the impression he hated the sandwiches too, and the other attendees, and me also.

I stood there with a warm glass of wine, nodding, searching for a polite exit, while a complete stranger unloaded fifteen years of accumulated resentment onto a man he'd seen present earlier. At first I thought he was furious about my talk. He wasn't. I just seemed like the kind of person who would listen. I didn't catch his name entirely, Paul, Pauline, Paulo, Pete, Patricia. Who knows. I simply referred to him after as Mr Freaking Furious.

I still think about him now – not with pity, or judgement – far from it, but with recognition. Because the more conferences I went to, the more of him I met. Different clothing, same speech. Capable people, clever people, people who'd done everything right and worked hard, and arrived somewhere hollow and stuck and furious about it.

I didn't want to become him.

So I went home, found a sheet of paper, wrote my name at the top and listed everything I wanted from my working life, an early version of a painted picture. Then I pinned it to the wall and did absolutely nothing about it for a year. I picked up the paper a year later, when my first son was born. Struck by the baby effect, and the need to grow up myself, I took the paper from the wall and took it all a little more seriously.

Which, being honest, is the easier part of the story.

Knowing what you want turns out to be relatively straight forward, if you give it some time. The hard part – is choosing it and making a commitment to it and sticking with it even when everything seems to be going against you – turning the words on a sheet paper into actions in the world. And at a point in time deciding to thrive.

Now, a caveat, and a firm one, because "how to thrive at work" is the sort of phrase that turns up on a motivational poster or in stock photos of people doing yoga on clifftops whilst taking a zoom call. This is not that, and I've no wish to add to that particular pile.

There's no framework here – no five pillars, no instagram-able acronym, no LinkedIn motivational headlines, no ten-step programme to manifest the future. I'm not pretending it is easy to do (because it is not), nor possible (because it may not be), nor what you may even want (you may not).

What follows isn't really advice so much as one man's account – mine – of what it's actually taken to build a working life I don't quietly resent. Some of it may fit you. A fair bit of it won't. You know your own life, the season you're in, the opportunities available to you; I only know mine. So take whatever is useful and leave the rest on the shelf.

I've found the first step to anything useful is to be clear about what we're even chasing, because thriving and succeeding in your job are not the same thing, and we tend to confuse them until it gets too late, and we become furious.

You can succeed by every measure the world hands you – salary, house, car, job title – and still feel that something personally important has been lost while you were on the journey. To thrive is to grow without shrinking the rest of your life to make room – to build a working life that supports the person you're becoming rather than slowly turning them into a shadow of yourself. It's a small distinction that changes everything downstream, because it changes the question you ask. Chasing success, you ask what you should do more of. Trying to thrive, you ask a better one: what is this costing me, and is it worth it?

The first thing then, and the one that catches most people out, is simply to decide to thrive. Not succeed at the job you have or the industry you are in, but at the life you wish to live. It sounds simple but I've noticed that many people don't do it, including myself before my son was born – actually deciding in your own mind to thrive, and what thriving personal means to you.

A good working life almost never arrives by momentum and trusting in the kindness of those you are working for, or by staying busy and hoping something worthwhile pops your way in the background. The man at the conference, I don't think, had decided to thrive, and what it meant to him; he'd just kept going he told me, and going is not the same as choosing.

Most of us do eventually stop and ask what we actually want – but usually only after something forces it: a hard diagnosis, a child arriving, a job that grinds us down far enough, redundancy. But we don't have to wait for a compelling event to make the decision. The trick is to ask what thriving means to us before life makes you, while it's still cheaper to answer and you're potentially less furious.

A lot of everything good in your work life after that, runs through other people, which is annoying for those of us who'd absolutely prefer it didn't. Work moves through relationships and people, not processes and meetings – the colleague who tells you the truth, the person who speaks well of you when you're not in the room, the person in another team who saves you three weeks with a single conversation. None of that happens by accident, and none of it is networking, which is the boring annoying uncle of the real thing.

And the people most worth building good relationships with are very often the ones least like you – they notice what you miss, solve what you'd avoid, and ask the questions you may never have considered. Learning how people actually differ, in how they think and work and want to be spoken to, is one of the most underrated skills going, and almost no one is taught it. It's one of the best ways to personally grow - to widen your awareness of the world you occupy, and to appreciate everyone for who they really are.

I've learned it's worth keeping an eye on joy, of all things – not the demand that every day be delightful with unicorns and treats and nice bisucuits, or the dreaded forced fun at work, but the ratio. If joy has become the rare exception rather than a regular feature of your weeks, that isn't something to be ignored, or pushed through with a stiff upper lip. It's information. It's a signal. It's telling you something. Fun is the early warning system; when it stops appearing, something about the conditions has changed, and the useful response is curiosity, not endurance.

Watch your values, too, because that's where the real damage gets done. Every working life involves a compromise of values; the only real question is whether you're making the conscious trade or slowly giving what you really stand for away. The people who end up bitter almost never point to the moment it happened, because there wasn't one — it was a hundred small capitulations of your values and beliefs, none of them big enough to notice on the day. You can only catch that if you know your own values clearly enough to feel the friction when you're crossing them often and letting them slide.

On the work itself, the move is to aim towards the value being generated by the company, rather than effort alone. Busyness is not the same as contribution. I'm reminded of the wonderful quote from Thomas Carlyle here "Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight". If we're not careful a lot of our working life can be spent on work that didn't need to be done, in meetings that didn't need to happen and in companies that didn't appreciate what we do.

The most effective people I've worked with weren't the busiest – they were relentless about understanding what actually mattered where they were, and then almost rude about pointing their energy at it. And the growth, real personal development, tends to live at the edges of a job rather than the centre: the problems nobody owns, the gaps between teams, the thing everyone agrees matters and no one picks up to get done. Taking those on, carefully and without resentment, is how people outgrow the role they were hired into.

None of this lasts though if you decide you've already learned all there is to learn, especially in the company you are in. Stagnation starts the moment you're certain you know how things run and how things work – because the market moves, the organisation moves, the problem moves, and the people who last aren't the ones who mastered something early and stuck there, but the ones who stayed curious long after everyone told them they were great.

And through all of it, the thing worth holding is both halves at once: effective and human. Results without care for people hollow people out, including yourself; care without results becomes a nice place to sit for tea and biscuits but often results in little discernable business value too. Holding both being effective, and being liked, is harder than it sounds, and it's mostly a communication problem if we look.

But this is about thriving in life, of which work is only one part. Underneath all the work talk, there's the part that isn't about work at all – and the most important, which is why I've come to it last. This one is mine, and you can take it or leave it: I've spent a great many evenings reading bedtime stories to my three sons, when there was, without any doubt at all, more work I could have been doing, and I've never once regretted that trade.

Work matters. People matter more. But maybe it should always be family first.

The balance between work and life is a myth. It's not real. It's never a balance, but instead a tension between the very pillars that make you who you are. That tension is ours to own over a life. Seeing it though, is the first step.

Because thriving was never something that arrives one morning, finished. It's the sum of a lot of small choices, made again and again, and it's truly, deeply, remarkably hard – what you protect, what you refuse to give away, what you decide is genuinely worth it. The man at the conference had worked hard for fifteen years, I've no doubt at all. What he maybe never did was choose to thrive. He'd just kept moving, essentially letting others steer his work life. And now he was furious.

And the moment you stop postponing deciding what thriving means to you, the opportunity arises for you to write it down, decide on it, and do the often unglamorous work of making it real.