Not Challenged at Work? Try This Before Stepping Off the Treadmill

My son used to be fascinated with our treadmill. He saw my wife and I running on it and thought it was the coolest toy in the house, largely because it was off limits and thus, foreign to him.

One day, we decided to let him walk and then jog on it. He had a blast that first day, playing with the speed and incline under our close supervision. He was on it for four miles and I had yet to see him walk that far outside of the house.

After that, he jumped on it a few more times but each time, he stayed on it for a shorter duration. Today, he won’t go near it.

Why?

What was once novel, exciting and challenging is now just monotonous, routine work and he chooses to spend his time elsewhere.

Adults are not wired any differently than children. We love a challenge, love to learn, love freedom to create and grow personally.

If you take a job that only challenges you in so much as that the job requires more hours than you have in one day, you’ll inevitably hate your job. Picture it the same as if you only exercised one way, by getting on a treadmill and running harder every day than you did the day before. No variation on pace, no intervals, no elevation changes — just busting your ass as fast as you can go until you are exhausted and then doing it again tomorrow.

It may be challenging but the lack of creativity will drive you nuts and you’ll grow to hate working out.

If you mix in some treadmill with other forms of exercise like weight lifting, biking, yoga and trail running, you might come to look forward to your treadmill day because it isn’t the only thing you ever do.

In my first summer internship, I took the work of mechanical engineers and digitized it with a computer program. The first two weeks of this job were exciting for me. I was learning how to use a new software program, getting to know the team I was on and generally adding value in a line of work that was foreign to me.

After training, I received my first assignment, which was a draft of an automotive trunk hinge. I took the hand-drawn draft from the engineer and set about recreating it on my computer. It took me all day because I wanted to get it right. I was so proud when I saved that file and emailed my boss that I completed the assignment.

I was rewarded with a new assignment, another drawing of a hinge. This one fit inside of a truck’s hood which was interesting but it was still a hinge. I finished this one in 6 hours to receive my next reward. Another hinge.

With each assignment, I became more proficient, faster and more productive. Soon enough, I was finishing 7–8 drawings in a single day as there just wasn’t much variability and I could work on auto-pilot. This is when I started hating my job.

Days dragged on, the challenge became work and I lost all enthusiasm that came with that initial pace of learning. My new challenge was finding new and amusing ways of staying awake for eight hours every day.

I’ve found that so long as I am learning and feel as if the job forces me to adapt, learn, grow and change, I love work.

Leaders play a crucial role in making work meaningful for their team. Not every company is sexy or fulfills some life-long passion. Actually, most companies can’t claim either of those. Most companies offer products and services that fill basic consumer or business needs. That doesn’t mean that they don’t need critical thinkers and new ideas to grow and thrive.

Great leaders don’t just listen to the ideas of folks on their team, they actively seek them out and offer opportunities to act on those ideas.

After that internship, I pursued sales roles out of college. I took one that stretched me every day. My product offerings were varied and my customers worked in a wide range of industries. On top of that, I was building a new account package, cold calling regularly and doing this during a nasty downturn.

I struggled to succeed for months but never hated the job, even though I wasn’t producing what was expected of me. The challenge shot me out of bed like a rocket every morning until three years later, I was one of the top producers in the company. I was making great money but the challenge was growing stale.

Most leaders would have milked me for as many productive years as possible. I was lucky to have a manager who understood that I performed best when the challenge in front of me was uncertain. He asked me to replicate my success by building a small team of recent college graduates and teaching them how to prospect.

I was offered no additional money. My title stayed the same. None of my current responsibilities were taken away to make time for that assignment.

You’re probably wondering why I felt fortunate to have this manager.

I couldn’t have been more energized. I had to learn how to recruit, interview, on-board, train, manage direct reports and generate results through others. I did my job during the day and in the afternoons and evenings, I coached my new team. I watched them grow and we became a close knit unit. That role was rewarding as I got to keep doing a job I loved while learning new skills.

That assignment led to multiple promotions once I proved that I could build successful teams. With each promotion, I was forced to learn new territories, new product offerings, new teams, new challenges. I loved work for nearly 20 years, largely because I worked for so many great managers who kept giving me something new while still working on my previous role.

If our company was considering a change, I was asked what my opinion was. If I wasn’t asked, I made sure that my managers knew my opinion anyway.

If we were testing a new product or process, I had opportunities to conduct pilots. I raised my hand for every corporate project, understanding I wouldn’t get paid one cent for the additional work. In doing so, my skill set grew and long term, I earned much more money than had I been selfish early in my career.

I left big corporate in January to start something new. I had simply run out of challenges and was itching to start something on my own. I loved my company but after 13 years, it was starting to feel like more of the same every year and my pace of learning had decelerated to a point where I wasn’t satisfied.

In other words, the corporate treadmill had run out of new ways to excite me.

Now, I am learning something new every day, often in humbling fashion. I am starting a business in a market where I have zero experience which stretches me in new and exciting ways every week. Just like my first sales job, small failures are motivating me now whereas small wins were putting me to sleep last year.

If you are looking to enjoy your job more, you might not need to step off the treadmill. You might just ask your manager for a new challenge. Ask if you can take something off his or her plate. Ask if you can take on a new project or propose a new idea. Ask for responsibility that you know will stretch your current skill set. Ask if you can take on a different role.

You might be surprised with how much more exciting your job becomes when you ask for more work.

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