How to actually enjoy your work (without quitting and starting your own personal petting zoo)

Every few years, someone writes a big-deal book or gives a TED talk that basically says: follow your passion and the rest will fall into place. And every few years, a few million people hear it, look at their current job, feel vaguely deficient, and either quit impulsively or spiral into a low-grade existential crisis at their desk.

I've coached a lot of people through both outcomes.

Here's what I want to say to you, the person who typed "how to make work more enjoyable" into Google at—let me guess—some point between 2 PM and 4 PM on a Tuesday: the passion advice is wrong. Not wrong like "it doesn't work for everyone"—wrong like it fundamentally misunderstands what makes work enjoyable in the first place.

And the good news is that what actually works, you can do without quitting your job, burning your resume, or spending three years getting a barista certificate.

The myth doing the most damage

"Find work you're passionate about and you'll never work a day in your life."

Easy, peasy, lemons queasy. ..Not.

The passion model assumes that enjoyment is exclusively a property of the work itself—that certain jobs are inherently fulfilling and others are inherently soul-crushing, and your only job is to find the right category. Under this model, if you're not enjoying your work, you're in the wrong job. Simple as that.

But that's not how enjoyment works. Not at work, not anywhere.

Think about the things in your life you genuinely enjoy—cooking, running, playing music, coaching your kid's soccer team, whatever. Now think about what would happen if you were required to do those things on someone else's schedule, for someone else's goals, with no input on how or when, and evaluated on metrics you had no say in. How long before you hated them?

Passion isn't the thing. It was never the thing.

What actually makes work enjoyable

Let me start by saying this: at the end of the day, you know what makes your work enjoyable better than anyone else. Reflect on experiences you've enjoyed, contexts where you've felt connected, and days that have felt rewarding.

And, if it's helpful, here's how some other folks have thought about it.

Rather than list out six different theories for work satisfaction, I'm going to make my attempt at articulating the through-line I see across them all: to feel happy with your work, you need to feel like you're good at it, feel like it matters, and feel like you're connected to people.

The hard part is how we craft this for everyone—this is why it's so important to know yourself and how you respond to different contexts: the exact context that makes you feel those criteria above is unique to you.

So! Good luck.

And here are some questions to push you in the right direction.

• Are my basic needs met? Do you have adequate pay? Do you have health insurance? Do you have the means to support yourself?
• Am I able to do the job? Do I have the skills and support to do what I'm tasked with? Am I given grace and space to try things out?
• Do I have a positive relationship with the folks around me? Do I get along with my coworkers? Does my manager communicate with me in a way that sits well with me? Do I feel appreciated for the work I do?

It's worth noting that neither you nor your place of work can identify and implement the answers to these questions independently. It's ultimately a negotiation of sorts for you to identify your needs, for the organization (eg: your manager) to identify its needs, and for you to work together to thread that needle.

Your manager can't meet your needs if they don't know what they are for you, specifically. But you can't meet your needs if your manager isn't willing to offer a level of change to make it happen.

I've talked about it before, but again: needs and expectations are two very different things. Keep that in mind when you go into a conversation like this.

And here's what that means practically: these are levers you can actually move. You don't have to find a new job to make work more enjoyable. "Passion" won't make your workplace any more comfortable or your clients any less hostile.

But a conversation with your manager just might help.

Basic needs - no, really.

This is an obvious one, but boy golly does the meta conversation about this in research kinda take this for granted. Admittedly, because these are, in truth, fairly universal, I'm going to stick to a quick list. But suffice it to say that if these are missing at your place of work, it is perfectly reasonable to say it's not working for you.

From compensation and benefits at your work, you need to be able to access:

• Housing
• Health insurance
• Safety
• Transportation
• Free time

These should not be what folks need to make a decision on between jobs. It is—and this is true—insane that these are not givens for everyone and their grandma, working or no. And so, they must be stated explicitly.

Onward from "things you need to not feel crappy" to "things you need to feel actively good".

Autonomy and competence

Most people have more autonomy available to them than they realize. It turns out, nobody's thought carefully about where the boundaries are in your work—you probably can't decide what projects you work on, but can you decide how you approach a project? When in the day you do deep work vs. shallow work? What format your deliverables take? How you structure a meeting you're running?

You get to be the master of (a good portion of) your domain.

These micro-autonomies matter more than we give them credit for. When you own how you do the work, even when you don't own what the work is, it just might feel a bit better.

Propose something before it's assigned to you, volunteer for the project you actually want, shape the scope of what you're handed. The career transition guide gets into this, but one of the most consistent findings in career coaching is that people with more career satisfaction aren't in different jobs—they're in jobs where they've learned to negotiate the terms of the work itself.

And if you've asked for more autonomy, asked thoughtfully, and the answer is consistently no—that's data. Not about whether you're capable of enjoying work, but about whether this particular environment will ever give you enough room to.

A piece of autonomy is a sense of competence: it's hard to feel good at your job if you don't have a sense of control over it, and vice versa.

By this point, we've all heard of flow, that sense of focus you get when you're doing something that is just at the edge of your ability: doable, but not boring.

It's available in a well-run meeting, a tricky spreadsheet, a presentation you actually prepared for, a conversation with a colleague where you helped them solve something that had been stuck for weeks.

If you're feeling bored at work, consider seeking out a challenge. A key aspect of competence is the sense of improvement. That doesn't mean throwing yourself into something where you'll definitely fail—that feels crappy, too. It means trying something harder, and seeking the support to make it doable.

There's something to be said for being good enough, and yet—it's also one of the main reasons work feels flat. Safety and satisfaction aren't the same thing.

The practical move: identify one skill that matters to you and deliberately practice it. Not a LinkedIn-brained skills gap analysis. Just something you want to be better at—presenting, negotiating, writing, leading a room—and put it in front of yourself regularly enough to actually improve. Track the improvement, even informally. The evidence of your own growth is one of the most reliable ways to feel engaged.

And if your current role has no room for growth—nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing to get better at—that's worth naming clearly. Stagnation and dissatisfaction are close cousins. (If this sounds like feeling stuck, it might be.)

Connection: it's okay to want to work with people you get along with

I have a client—let's call them Ted—who spent three years insisting they didn't care about the "soft stuff." They just wanted to do good work, get paid fairly, and go home. When their team got reshuffled and they ended up with a manager who actually gave a damn, Ted reported, somewhat baffled, that they suddenly enjoyed their job. Same work, same title, same company; wildly different experience.

Ted is not an outlier.

The research is actually pretty unambiguous on this: the quality of your relationships at work is one of the strongest predictors of job satisfaction—stronger than compensation, job type, or industry. Not close relationships, necessarily. Just the feeling of being seen. Of your work mattering to someone. Of genuine human exchange happening in the hours you're there.

This is hard to manufacture, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it's also not out of your control. A few things that actually move it:

Invest in two or three relationships, not seventeen. Pick the people whose work you respect or who energize you, and actually show up for them—ask real questions, share credit openly, check in when things are rough.

Find the work that connects to someone's real problem. One of the most reliable ways to feel like your work matters is to actually understand who it serves. A specific person who's going to use the thing you made, or the colleague downstream who's going to build on what you produce. Knowing who the work is for changes how it feels to do it. And how do you find what that is? Ask them. They'll love that you did.

If your manager doesn't see you, manage up. This sounds uncomfortable, but it's mostly just communication. A good one-on-one is the simplest lever for this—a consistent rhythm where you're sharing what you're working on, what's going well, what you're proud of. You can't force someone to value your work. You can make it easier for them to notice it.

"But Peter, I genuinely just don't like what I do"

Fair. All of this works better in jobs where there's at least some potential for autonomy, competence, and connection—and some jobs genuinely don't offer that. If you're in one of those, the answer isn't to white-knuckle it with better strategies.

It's also worth being honest about whether the problem is the work or the environment. The same job in a different context can feel completely different. I've watched folks leave jobs they thought they hated, join a competitor doing the exact same work, and thrive. And I've watched the reverse—people who chased their "passion" into a bad team, bad management, or a bad culture, and found that passion alone is no match for a truly miserable environment. I wrote a bit about that here.

What I'm pushing back on is the assumption that enjoying work requires finding a fundamentally different kind of work. For most people, in most situations, the autonomy/competence/connection levers are where the actual movement is.

Pete's blessing

Here's Pete's blessing: you don't have to be passionate about your job to enjoy it. You just need enough autonomy to feel like a person, enough challenge to feel like you're growing, and enough connection to feel like the work matters to someone.

That's a much more achievable bar than "find your calling."

Start there. See what moves. And if you want help figuring out which lever to pull first in your specific situation, that's exactly what I do.

Let's make work suck less.