You’re stuck. You think your job sucks and there’s probably no way to make it better. OK. We can work with that. Really, Jason Seiden, author of How to Self-Destruct (excerpted below, and winning awards for highest percentage of sarcasm ever in a business book) can help you. He’s got a few options, and one should do the trick.
---Your Brazen Editor

First, you can wait for someone else to pull you into a better, more exciting place. This option worked wonders for such venerable women and men as Cinderella (saved by Prince Charming), Snow White (saved by Prince Charming, too—presumably an older brother), Luke Skywalker (saved by Obi-Wan Kenobi), and Neo (“saved” by Morpheus, although there is significant debate as to whether unplugging from the Matrix was a step up). Now, I know what you’re thinking. Your mind is saying, “Jase, you silly goose, I’m not a movie character!”

Touché.

In that case, I’d encourage you to consider option number two: Look at your position, stop whining, and say, “OK, I need to turn this job into something that I can put my heart and soul into, which means I need to think about what I’m good at and how I can use that skill—or those skills—in my job.

And if I can’t use those skills, I need to think about how to modify my job so that I can.”

IMPORTANT CAVEAT for the Millennium Generation: Continually changing jobs until one grabs you is not a path that leads to nirvana. Bailing on boring work is not what I’m talking about. It doesn’t work. Don’t try it.

If you’re on your fourth job in as many years, the problem isn’t the job, it’s you. The way to modify your job and turn it into something great is to

1) identify where you want to go and who you need to help you get there, and then

2) enjoy the meandering, surprising process of creating the very future you desire to have.

No matter how low down the totem pole you are, you have the resources—right now—to begin climbing up.

Whereas most of the people around you do their jobs all day and spend all their time daydreaming trying to imagine a conversation with their boss where they ask for a promotion, focus instead on preparing for the job you intend to move into.

Picture yourself in that job: what issues will you face? How will you handle your friends, who will now be subordinates? How will you interact with your new peers? The more clearly you can see it, the more likely it is to happen.

Whatever the process is for you, it’s always the antithesis of analysis. It’s an internal “knowing” and it’s what people are talking about when they describe how to manifest intentions or willing something to happen. It can be a powerful tool, and you should do everything in your power to develop it.

By the way: you can’t develop your intuition by trying harder. Trying harder implies using an analytical feedback loop to make incremental improvements. Intuition works the opposite way. You develop intuition by becoming more comfortable making decisions without the deep analytics. It’s not about “developing” your gut as much as it’s about getting back to your gut . . . finding the decision mechanism you used when you were first born to eat, distinguish your parents from strangers, and figure out when and how to communicate. Honing your intuition should feel more like uncovering a memory than making a new discovery.