The job I almost quit a dozen times

A few years ago, I accepted a job offer that most people would've scoffed at.

It was a six-month fixed-term contract for a quality manager role at a food company, and it paid so far below the usual salary band that I felt embarrassed whenever anyone asked about it.

I took it anyway. I didn't think I was qualified, so it felt like a rare chance to move forward in my career, and the offer seemed fair for someone like me.

When I started, I felt like an imposter if there ever was one. Every single day, I was afraid of being found out.

My predecessor gave me a one-day handover before she left the country. After that, I was on my own. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and no one in the company, not my team, not even my boss, seemed to know what the role actually involved or where to find what I needed to do it.

I spent the first month lost, and that's an understatement. I knew I had to do something, and fast, or be exposed for the imposter I was so sure I was.

I had two options. I could keep my head down, avoid anything that might expose how little I knew, and blame the system for not setting me up to succeed. Or I could face the problem head on and learn to figure it out.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted by the first option. I dreaded my one-on-ones with my manager, where I felt I had to perform and prove I was somehow doing something of value. After every one of those meetings, the first option looked a little more attractive.

We call it being realistic

Blaming the system would have been easy to justify. The handover really was inadequate, and the role really wasn't set up for anyone to succeed in it.

But it helps to look at what each option actually offers. If I chose blame, nothing would change. Nobody was coming to fix the role for me.

If I chose to face the problem, I might fail. But it was the only option where anything could change.

Blaming is tempting because it protects us. It absolves us of responsibility, since it's not our problem to solve. And if we never have to solve it, we skip the risk of trying, failing, and confirming the fear we had about ourselves all along.

We tell ourselves we're just seeing the situation for what it is. We call it being realistic. But for me, underneath that was a pervasive pessimism that I'd carried for most of my life, a quiet belief that the problem couldn't be solved, at least not by me.

I'd been down that path before. In the first few years of my career, I'd blamed the system plenty, and it had got me nowhere. So what did I have to lose by trying a different approach?

Willing to figure it out

Deciding to try was one thing. Knowing how was another, and I still had no idea where to start.

What helped was something I noticed about the people I admired. In those first few weeks, as I found my feet, I met many new people, and a few of them stood out. Perhaps it was because they were confident, charismatic, and seemed to know what they were doing. But as I got to know them better, I realised they didn't have it all figured out either. What set them apart was that they were willing to figure it out.

That changed how I saw my own situation. If not knowing was normal, then the role wasn't proof that I was out of my depth. It was simply a problem nobody had solved yet. In fact, with no predefined way of doing things, there were also no inherited, clunky processes to fight against. What first appeared as an insurmountable problem turned out to be an opportunity. It was a role I could shape into something that actually made sense.

I'd known about agency long before that job. I'd just never been forced to practise it.

So figure it out I did. I reached out to people across the business despite my shyness, asked questions until I understood how each function worked despite my fear of looking ignorant, and looked for where I could actually add value despite feeling I had little to offer. Each small problem I solved chipped away at the belief that I wasn't capable of figuring things out.

Inevitable, but soluble

That job changed how I see problems.

I used to see them as signs of trouble, things to be avoided wherever I could.

By the end of it, I saw them as an unavoidable part of doing anything worthwhile, but no longer something to fear, because I'd learned they could be solved, even when I didn't yet know the answer.

Turns out, there's a name for this.

Physicist and philosopher David Deutsch calls it rational optimism.

There are people who tend to dismiss optimism as being delusional (usually the pessimists who think they're just being realistic), and it's easy to see why. When most of us hear the word, we picture blind optimism, where we believe that things will somehow turn out fine even without us having to do anything. That kind of optimism is wishful thinking, and hands responsibility over to luck.

But rational optimism is different. It doesn't promise that things will turn out fine. It openly acknowledges that problems are inevitable, but it also argues that all problems are soluble with the right knowledge, as long as solving them doesn't break the laws of physics.

Rational optimism puts the responsibility back in our hands. If a problem can be solved, we don’t have to sit around hoping it magically resolves itself. We can find the solution by acting, trying things, and learning from what doesn’t work.

A never-ending supply of problems might sound daunting, even depressing. But there's good reason to see it as the most optimistic part of all.

One way to think of a problem is as a gap between where we are and where we want to be, when we don't yet know how to get there. That points to a gap in our knowledge, and gaps in knowledge can be filled. Once we fill that gap and get to where we wanted to go, we soon discover new problems we didn't have before, a new destination on the horizon that we now want to head towards. If we never solved any problems, we'd stay exactly where we are. Seen this way, problems are the starting point for progress.

Every improvement I made in that role began with something I didn't know how to do. If I had started the role with perfect knowledge, then there would have been far less to figure out, and far less to learn. In other words, I would have finished that role exactly as I'd started it.

Which way you're running

Looking back, it's easy to say of course we should be rationally optimistic. It makes logical sense. But the shift didn't happen all at once. Over the following years in that role, I wanted to quit more than a dozen times. Every one of those times, I was running from a problem I was afraid I couldn't solve. Each time, I chose to stay and face the problem instead.

Facing those problems is what slowly made rational optimism my default, and it's what kept me in the role. My six-month contract was extended by another four months, then became permanent. I ended up staying for three years.

When I finally did leave, it was no longer because I was running away from a problem. I was running towards a new and better problem, the next chapter of my life.

From the outside, the two kinds of leaving look exactly the same. A resignation letter doesn’t say whether you’re running from a problem you’ve decided can’t be solved, or choosing a better one to solve. Only the person leaving knows which one it is.

So the next time a problem makes you want to walk away, it’s worth asking which way you’re running. If it’s away, the problem might not be beyond you at all. It might just be one you haven’t solved yet. And you don't need to have it all figured out before you begin. The people we admire rarely do. They’re simply willing to figure it out, and that willingness is a choice available to every one of us.