Plenty of successful men have changed jobs at least once to fix a feeling.
I did it at a turning point in my career, to get away from a situation that I felt had become intolerable.
For others, the role has gone flat. The work you once loved has become something you can do with half your attention.
So you moved. New logo on the lanyard, new people to win over.
For a while, it worked.
You felt switched on again. You were learning, and people were noticing.
Then, somewhere in the second year, the old feeling crept back in.
Same flatness. Different building.
If that's happened to you, there's a study that shows the shape of it with surprising precision.
Wendy Boswell, John Boudreau and Jan Tichy followed the job satisfaction of executives year by year, before and after they changed jobs by choice.
What they found looks almost too neat.
Satisfaction tended to dip in the year before a move. That dip was often what pushed people to go.
In the first year in the new job, it rose. The researchers called that the honeymoon.
By the second year, it had sunk back to where it was before. They called that the hangover.
A large study in Germany later found the same pattern, and only in people who'd chosen to move.
Now...
...this is the part that's interesting, and obvious when you think about it.
Almost everything about the job had changed. The one thing that came along unchanged was the man doing it.
I'd say the lift in that first year comes mostly from newness. A new job asks things of you the old one stopped asking. You have to pay attention again, and the intense focus that attention brings feels a lot like being alive.
Once the newness wears off, you're back with what you brought with you. The same pace, and the same voice in your head that says this still isn't quite it.
When I made that 'escape' move, I was so relieved to be out of a bad situation, and working with people I genuinely liked, that at first I was engaged and excited.
But once that veneer faded and I was back in the weeds, I realised I was just as stuck and miserable as ever.
None of this means a move is a mistake. Plenty of moves are the right call, and the study doesn't say otherwise. What it does say is that, on average, the lift from the move itself fades within a couple of years.
If you've been reading job specs late at night, or taking the headhunter's calls a little more warmly than you used to, try one thing before you go.
Write down what you're hoping to feel in the new role that you don't feel now. Just a line or two will do.
Then read the job description again and ask whether anything in it actually promises that.
Usually it doesn't. What most of us are missing is a sense of aliveness, or of our work mattering, and no job description can offer that.
There's a hopeful side to this. In my experience, that feeling can come back in the job you've already got. It tends to come back when you change how you're living inside the work, wherever the work happens to be.
If the next job couldn't change how you feel, what would you want to change first?
If this rang true, More to Play For comes out every Tuesday. One idea a week for successful men at midlife who've built the career and want the next decade to count even more. You can subscribe below.
Matt
Sources: Boswell, Boudreau and Tichy, 'The relationship between employee job change and job satisfaction: the honeymoon-hangover effect', Journal of Applied Psychology (2005) · Chadi and Hetschko, 'The magic of the new: how job changes affect job satisfaction', Journal of Economics and Management Strategy (2018)