Recently in the news there's been this term going around called “quiet quitting”. In a nutshell, that is doing the basic amount of work that you need to do to get a paycheck at your job. Just enough to get by. Nothing extra, not volunteering for overtime, not going above and beyond your job description. And in my experience, that's probably the biggest mistake you can make in your career.
It's been my experience that the cart always has to come before the horse. Right? That's an expression you hear a lot. But usually they tell you not to do that. But employers have to see what you're capable of doing before they can compensate you accordingly. Now there's a fine line between being taken advantage of and showing that you're eager to learn and do new things. You should be aware of this. For sure.
That term “quiet quitting” goes a little too far at toeing the other side of the line. And a lot of times what you're actually doing is you're not doing extra things for your job. When you do extra things what you're actually, in my experience, is learning something that you can take to your next job. Because unfortunately, this is just the way that the game works, your biggest raises in your career come when you switch jobs or when you tell your employer you're looking elsewhere and they compensate you to keep you at your current job.
You have to, as a father, as a husband, look for those next big steps. In the near future, I'm going to have a free training that goes over the important pillars of fatherhood. And one of the sections talks about keeping yourself employable. And you do that by learning new skills or becoming better at the skills that you currently have. This way, when you do go out in the job market and look for a new job, you're employable to somebody else and that next job is going to give you a bigger raise than the annual raise that you'll receive at your current employer.
The other thing that can happen is you look for another job and your current employer finds out you're doing it. They in turn want to keep you because you're a great employee that goes above and beyond what you're supposed to do, and they will compensate you to keep you. Now, that's just the name of the game. That's the way it's played. If you play any sport at all, you understand that you play the game within the rules of the game. You toe the line within the rules of the game and you take every advantage you can to win the game that you're playing.
So people that practice this “quiet quitting” mindset, are going to find out that in the short term, they feel they're getting compensated exactly for the work that they're doing, but in the long run, they're going to do themselves a disservice by not becoming employable to somebody else, where their bigger pay jumps will come from.
Yours in Fatherhood
Andres