You Can Be Good at Something and Still Need to Leave It

I’ve spent most of my working life in kitchens.

And, without disappearing too far up my own arse about it, I’m pretty good at it.

That should make things simple.

You find something you’re good at. You spend years getting better at it. People trust you to do it. You build experience, knowledge and a reasonably impressive collection of burns on your forearms.

Then you keep doing it.

That’s how careers are supposed to work.

Except eventually I started wondering whether being good at something was actually a good enough reason to keep doing it.

Turns out that’s a much more awkward question.

Being good at something changes the decision

It is relatively easy to leave something you hate and are terrible at.

Nobody sits you down and says:

“But Stu, have you really considered throwing away all those years of being shit at this?”

Competence complicates things.

Once you become good at something, other people start relying on you.

You become the person who knows what to do.

The person who can fix things when they go wrong.

The person who can walk into a mess, look around and start putting it back together.

That feels good.

It also becomes part of who you are.

At some point you stop being someone who works in a kitchen and become a chef.

Your job becomes part of the answer to who you are.

You collect years of experience. Qualifications. Stories. Skills that you barely even notice you have anymore because they’ve become automatic.

Then one day you find yourself looking at the thing you spent all that time becoming good at and thinking:

I’m not sure I want to do this forever.

And that can feel dangerously close to admitting all those years were a mistake.

They weren’t.

But I understand why it can feel that way.

“Can I still do it?” is a very low bar

There’s another problem with being competent.

You can usually keep going for quite a long time.

That isn’t necessarily good news.

When something gets difficult, my instinct has often been to ask:

Can I handle it?

Can I do another busy week?

Can I take on the extra responsibility?

Can I work around the problem?

Can I keep the plates spinning?

Usually, the answer is yes.

I probably can.

A lot of people probably can.

Human beings are annoyingly adaptable. Give us long enough and we can turn some fairly ridiculous situations into normal life.

But “Can I handle it?” only tells you whether you are capable of continuing.

It doesn’t tell you whether continuing is a particularly good idea.

It doesn’t tell you what it is costing.

And it definitely doesn’t tell you whether you still want it.

There is a fairly important difference between:

I can keep doing this.

and

I want to keep doing this.

I’m not convinced we ask the second question nearly enough.

There’s a lot tied up in staying

Leaving something you’re good at isn’t just a career decision.

There’s money.

Obviously.

There are responsibilities.

There are people depending on you.

There might be a family whose bills require considerably more planning than simply declaring that you are now following your passion.

There’s also the slightly uncomfortable prospect of going from experienced to inexperienced.

From being the person who knows the answers to being the person asking stupid questions.

From competence back to uncertainty.

After years of knowing roughly what you’re doing, that can be surprisingly difficult to volunteer for.

Then there’s the time you’ve already put in.

Ten years.

Fifteen.

Twenty.

It’s very easy to look at that and think you have to keep going, otherwise all that time was wasted.

But that only makes sense if the sole purpose of those years was to qualify you to spend the rest of your life doing exactly the same thing.

I don’t think it was.

You don’t hand your experience back when you leave.

You still know what you know.

You still have the judgement you developed.

You still know how to organise people, solve problems, handle pressure and make decisions when you don’t have all the information you’d ideally like.

I can manage a busy kitchen while three different people ask me questions, a printer keeps spitting orders out and somebody wants to know why table twelve has been waiting twenty-five minutes.

I’d like to think at least some of that might be transferable.

The skills came from the job.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to stay there.

Changing direction doesn’t require a small explosion

There’s a version of career change that looks wonderfully simple from the outside.

You realise life is too short.

You quit.

You go and do the thing you were apparently always meant to do.

Six months later you’re somehow earning twice as much and working from somewhere with palm trees.

Unfortunately, some of us need to pay the electricity bill.

Changing direction doesn’t have to mean detonating your existing life.

Sometimes the first step is simply admitting that you don’t want the current direction to continue forever.

You don’t even necessarily need to know where you’re going instead.

You can look at other work.

Learn something.

Try something small.

Talk to people outside your usual world.

Work out which parts of your current job you genuinely enjoy and which parts you’ve simply become very good at tolerating.

Build a few options before you desperately need one.

That’s less dramatic.

It’s also considerably more compatible with having a mortgage.

You don’t have to hate something to leave it

This is probably the bit I’ve found hardest to explain.

I don’t hate kitchens.

There are things about the work that I genuinely love.

A good service has an energy to it that is difficult to explain if you’ve never been in one.

There’s satisfaction in making something work.

In being part of a team that knows what it’s doing.

In taking chaos and turning it into dinner.

None of that disappears just because I’ve started wondering what else I might do.

I think we sometimes want cleaner explanations than real life gives us.

You leave because the job was terrible.

You change direction because the old direction was a disaster.

That’s easier to understand.

But something doesn’t have to be awful before you’re allowed to question whether you still want it.

A job can have been good for you.

It can have taught you things.

Given you opportunities.

Introduced you to people you care about.

Made you proud.

And still not be the thing you want to spend the next ten or twenty years doing.

Those things can all be true at once.

Being able to keep going doesn’t mean you should

Being good at something still matters.

I spent years learning this job, developing judgement and becoming someone other people trusted to know what he was doing.

I’m not particularly interested in pretending none of that counts just because I’m questioning what comes next.

It counts.

But being able to do something and being obliged to keep doing it are not the same thing.

Maybe the useful question isn’t:

Could I keep doing this?

Because the answer might well be yes.

Maybe it’s:

If I wasn’t already good at this, would I still choose it?

I don’t think answering that question means you need to hand in your notice tomorrow.

Real life is considerably more inconvenient than that.

But if the main reason you’re still doing something is that you’ve become very good at doing it, that probably deserves a closer look.

Being good at something means you can keep doing it.

It doesn’t mean you have to.