Good Work: Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition

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 *Could it be this simple? Just do things you like?*

 Sitting there at the table in my Airbnb in Taipei, a cup of coffee by my side, I felt that my reality had shifted.

 It all started to make sense: the endless job-hopping in my twenties, the dissatisfaction that never seemed to go away, the desire to escape to Asia after quitting my job and blowing up my life. The whole time, I had been desperately searching for something I could never quite understand, and now I had found it.

 *“How could I have missed it?” *I thought.* *For years I had written for fun and always found so much joy in it. Since I had quit my job sixteen months earlier, writing had been my only consistent activity. But I never considered it “work.” At 33 years old, I finally realized that this act of creative expression was an essential part of me.

 I stopped writing, took a deep breath and took in my surroundings. Rain pattered down on the metal awnings of the buildings on the street. The air in the room was heavy and humid and carried a musty scent from the wooden furniture that had likely been passed down from previous generations. In a city where most cafés don’t open until 11am, my pot of freshly brewed coffee filled the air with a distinctly American urgency I had yet to let go of.

 Since I had arrived in the apartment a few weeks earlier, this table had been my sanctuary. Each morning, I would make coffee, sit down, and write. But on this particular morning, I had a profound awakening. Channeling my curiosity into a newsletter post destined for just a small number of readers, I noticed a deep connection with my work, hyper-aware of it for the first time. I felt at ease, filled with a sense of abundance and possibility.

 The moment was a stark contrast to my life up until that point. For ten years I had bounced from job to job, searching for a sense of connection to my work that remained elusive, and by the end I simply ran out of energy to keep going. Pinpointing the exact cause of my burnout is an impossible task. It may have been the meetings where everyone only pretended to care, or how emails from clients were treated as secret messages to be decoded as the team jumped into crisis mode. Maybe it was simply knowing that I was playing a role in the whole performance, turning myself into the kind of person who gets a good review and a 5% raise at the end of the year.

 A perfect explanation doesn’t really matter because by the end, I was depleted. Despite having what was, on paper, a promising career, I saw no reasonable path forward. When I quit, it wasn’t an act of defiance but surrender. I had been vanquished by the demands of a modern career and as I walked away, I saw work itself as my unofficial adversary. *It had done this to me.*

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