The advice that broke us

If someone had told me at 28 that the advice I was following would put me on a couch unable to move by 40, I would have thought they were being dramatic.

I picked the safe career. Got the degrees. Stayed at jobs longer than I should have because leaving felt irresponsible. I was the first one in, last one out. I said yes to everything. I followed my passion straight into a career that made me miserable.

And when I burned out so badly I had to rebuild from scratch, I kept hearing the same story from every person I met with. We were from different industries, held different titles, and lived in different cities. But we all heard the same advice and saw the same results.

We all got the same playbook. And we all followed it.

I posted a list of the 12 pieces of career advice that created the millennial career crisis. But I want to go deeper on four of them today, because these are the ones I see doing the most damage for an entire generation.

“Follow your passion.”

We were supposed to find work that lights us up every single day. And when it didn’t, we assumed we picked wrong.

We attached our entire identity to our jobs. We made “what do you do?” the defining question of who we are. And when the job stopped feeling meaningful, we felt lost.

Because if work is supposed to be your passion, and the passion is gone, then who the hell are you?

I honestly think this is why burnout shakes us to our core. It goes way beyond the physical and truly becomes an identity crisis. We have a hard time separating who we are from what we do.

That’s what happens when an entire generation is told that work should be the main source of meaning in our lives.

Your job doesn’t owe you meaning. You owe yourself a paycheck, a life outside of work, and the freedom to care about things that have nothing to do with your title.

“Job hopping looks bad on your resume.”

They scared us into staying. So we stayed. Through the toxic boss, the pay freeze, and the four different reorgs that just kept cutting our teams. We stayed because loyalty was supposed to be rewarded. Because our parents told us to go work somewhere, spend 25 or 30 years there, and then retire.

That was a social contract. And organizations broke it a long time ago.

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Our reality now looks very different.

A Gallup report found that 21% of millennials changed jobs in the past year, three times the rate of non-millennials. Millennial turnover costs the US economy $30.5 billion annually. And a Korn Ferry study found that 55% of millennials feel unsettled in their careers, with 59% admitting they’re looking for an external excuse, like a layoff, to finally leave a job they already know isn’t working.

We aren’t disloyal. We just learned that our companies aren’t holding up their end of the agreement. The guilt from walking away still runs deep, though.

Friend, sunk cost is not a reason to stay. Time invested in a career that’s breaking you doesn’t obligate you to keep paying into it.

“Be the first one in, last one out.”

We ate this one up. Bragged about skipping lunch. Answered Teams messages from the hospital. And every time we went above and beyond, the bar just moved. All that above-and-beyond BS simply trained them to expect more (for free).

This one hits two burnout drivers at the same time. The conditions of the work (unsustainable hours, no boundaries, constant availability) erode your capacity (the physical, cognitive, and emotional bandwidth you have left to function).

And when both of those are firing at once, you don’t just burn out. You burn out fast.

The worst part is that this advice taught us to measure our worth in hours instead of outcomes. So when we finally do pull back, it feels like we’re failing. We’re not. We’re learning that effort still comes with limits.

“Let your work speak for itself.”

I struggle with this one the most. And this is one of the hills that I will die on.

We put our heads down and did the work. Great work, even. Work that moved numbers, saved accounts, and built entire programs from nothing. And nobody so much as batted an eye.

Because your work doesn’t speak. People speak. And the people who got promoted were the ones who made sure the right person heard them.

This is where visibility crafting comes in. It’s one of the five domains of job crafting I teach, and it’s the one that makes people the most uncomfortable. Because we were told that self-promotion is arrogant. That good work gets recognized on its own. That asking for credit is needy.

But visibility crafting is taking ownership of how your contributions are seen, recognized, and positioned within your organization. It means making sure the people who make decisions about your career actually know what you’ve done.

If you’ve been putting your head down and hoping someone will notice, I need you to hear this: they won’t. Your work is damn good. They’re just busy, distracted, and managing their own visibility. You have to speak for yourself. Your work won’t do it for you.

So what do you do with this?

Pick the one that maybe punched you in the gut a little. And this week, notice where it’s still running your decisions.

Are you staying somewhere out of loyalty that isn’t being returned? Are you saying yes to things you never actually chose? Are you keeping your head down, hoping someone will see what you’re doing without you having to say it out loud?

You don’t have to fix it this week. You just have to see it. Because the advice we followed became invisible. It turned into assumptions about how work is supposed to feel. And you can’t change a rule you don’t know you’re following.

Nobody who gave us this advice had to survive the workplaces we walked into. They handed us a playbook for a game that doesn’t exist anymore.

And the hardest part isn’t that the advice was wrong. It’s that we built our careers, and in some cases our entire identities, around following it.

​This is the millennial career crisis.​

We didn’t create it. We inherited it by being good kids who followed bad advice.

Take care,

Tara

P.S. My 1:1 Career Reboot Strategy Sessions typically book out at least a month in advance. So I’m doing something new. On June 16 at 7pm ET, I’m running a Career Reboot Group Intensive, a live 2-hour session on Zoom where I walk a small group through the same frameworks I use in my 1:1 work. It’ll be capped at 20 seats and registration will open June 1. More details coming soon.