Don’t Look for Jobs When You Don’t Want to Work - Look for Things to Do

When you’re lying on your couch at home after work in the classic “Ge You lying” position, your former colleague Xiao Zhang is at home editing short videos. While you complain about the exhausting commute, your childhood friend’s cross-border e-commerce store is experiencing another surge in orders.

As you adjust font colors on the Nth version of your PowerPoint presentation, you suddenly receive a social media notification from your college roommate—that art student who used to fail classes frequently is now surfing in Bali while creating commercial illustrations for clients. Then you realize that this world has long abandoned the script of “find a job—get promoted—retire.” Those who truly live fulfilling lives have already escaped the dead end of “job hunting.”

I. What You Hate Isn’t Work—It’s Ineffective Value Exchange

Data from a major recruitment platform shows that one-third of working professionals experience the urge to quit at least once a week. But what truly causes us pain has never been work itself, but rather the sense of alienation that Peter Drucker described as “slowly becoming a cog in the organizational machine.”

My friend Xiao Lan worked as an Account Executive at an advertising agency for five years, daily dealing with unreasonable client demands, until she posted her rejected creative concepts on a social platform. Within three months, she accumulated 10,000 targeted followers, and now a few sponsored posts can match her monthly salary.

We always say “I don’t want to work,” but no one refuses to code on the beach, negotiate deals in coffee shops, or provide consulting while traveling. What truly suffocates us is producing ten hours of value daily but receiving only a 30% discounted salary. As management expert Charles Handy said: Organizations are discount retailers of individual value.

Psychology has a “Self-Determination Theory”: people need autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Traditional workplaces fragment these three elements—your time is controlled by DingTalk, your abilities are limited by job descriptions, your salary is determined by the lowest wage that can fill the position, and your social circle is confined to cubicles. This is the root of our resistance.

I wonder how many people understand this statement: your salary isn’t determined by your value, but by the minimum wage needed to fill your position.

II. The Essence of “Finding Things to Do” Is Value Hunting

Finding a job means trading time for salary; finding things to do means trading value for returns. All business ultimately comes down to value exchange.

Working a job means selling your life in fragments to a company; finding things to do means packaging your time into products to sell to the market. Marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk put it bluntly: “Don’t be human capital cost; be human capital investment.”

The golden formula for finding things to do = What you’re good at × What people will pay for × What you can scale (replicable).

A stay-at-home mom who excelled at organizing and decluttering started by helping relatives and friends organize their closets. She later developed online courses, breaking down organizing processes into 7-day boot camps, and also sold organizing boxes, storage containers, and other organizing products. Her monthly income now exceeds her previous salary by several times.

This is the essence of business thinking—packaging personal skills into replicable products.

For those unsure of their capabilities, try the “Skill Transfer Canvas”: write your core skill in the center and brainstorm application scenarios around it.

For example, if you’re skilled at PowerPoint design, you can branch into template sales, corporate training, custom services, and educational courses.

Remember Kazuo Inamori’s “Vortex Theory”: when you focus on perfecting something, resources will converge toward you like a vortex.

I once read about a programmer who loved playing with drones. He started by helping real estate developers photograph properties for his own photography use, then developed advanced services like 3D modeling and digital twins. Last year, he quit his job and established his own drone studio, building a thriving business.

You don’t need earth-shattering creativity—taking ordinary skills to a professional level can break through limitations.

III. Building Your “Getting Things Done System”

1. Create Leverage: Make Time Generate Compound Returns

Psychological counselor Ye Zi originally provided 300 yuan/hour consultations at an institution. Later, she specialized in “workplace PTSD recovery,” anonymizing her consultation records to create a “Psychological First Aid Manual,” selling thousands of copies of the 298 yuan e-book. She said: “Don’t compete with everyone in red oceans; create blue oceans in your areas of expertise.” This echoes the wisdom from “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”: wealth requires products with replicability and zero marginal cost.

2. Build Pipelines: Design Self-Operating Systems

This concept comes from “The Parable of the Pipeline”—don’t be a “bucket carrier”; build your own pipeline.

For example, as a graduate of a finance university with investment knowledge and over a decade of market experience, I hold several dividend-paying stocks and funds for the long term. I never aimed for short-term wealth but only sought annual returns that exceed inflation by 3 percentage points. Over the years, this “slow” approach has become another form of “fast.”

As a fund manager I admire once said: “Willingness to be slow doesn’t necessarily mean being slow.”

In today’s era, the real “iron rice bowl” isn’t a specific position but the ability to create value at any time. Those days of replying to boss messages at midnight and the anxiety of being chased by KPIs are essentially because we’ve lived as “human resources” rather than “value creators.”

Remember, the world always rewards problem solvers, not instruction-waiting components. When you start viewing the world through the lens of “finding things to do,” every coffee shop can become an office, and every conversation might spark business opportunities. This is the most attractive way to live in the next decade.

Let’s encourage each other on this journey.