So you’ve heard this phrase before. What exactly is a job menality? It’s not a good or a bad thing, that’s the first thing you should know. If you have a job, perhaps you need to have the mentality that goes with it in order to do your job well. It’s only toxic when it exists where it doesn’t belong.
We all know what a job is – it’s a series of activities you must complete in order to get your paycheck. When you have a 9 to 5 job, especially if it’s not a career, when you’re young and idealistic, you start out buying into the myth that hard work and excellence will get you everything your heart desires.
So you pour your heart into the tasks, and wait for the brilliant shining moment when you’ll be rewarded for your hard work with a promotion, an increase in pay, or even a simple “thank you”.
And if you’re like most people, you start to see yourself passed over for the person who is cousins with the boss, or who hangs out with the right crowd the most. You start to see the chances that you thought went strictly to the person most qualified go to someone else.
Some people who stay in jobs never quite figure out how networking plays into this scenario, and give up. Other people employ networking, and other techniques to get themselves noticed, but even in this group, there are only so many positions, and so much additional bonuses or raises above and beyond the rate of inflation to go around.
Faced with this version of reality, many people give up, and do only the amount of work the money they are paid requires, just working hard enough not to get fired, as so eloquently stated in the film Office Space.
This is where the job menality comes in. Paper starts to get pushed around. “It’s not my job.” Caught in this situation you may start to think of yourself as “just over broke”.
And if that applies to you, and you don’t define yourself by what you do, maybe this makes sense in your life. We could argue for days about whether or not the corporate and blue collar culture needs to change in America and where to start, if this is true, but that’s another discussion entirely.
But for this discussion, our focus is on when the mentality that many apply to a 9 to 5 job belongs in an entrepreneur’s life, and if it is, whether it sucks up your money, or if taking advantage of its existence allows you to thrive.
So first, we’ll talk about how the job mentality can hurt the entrepreneur.
