What is Career Maximalism and Why Caring Too Much About Your Job Can Backfire

Sarah Doody (00:00.142)

Caring too much about your job can actually make you worse at it. Now, I know that might seem counterintuitive, but this episode is not about telling you to care less about your job. It’s really going to be about understanding how caring too much can sometimes backfire when it’s in the wrong place. Hey, I’m Sarah Doody, a user researcher and product designer with 20 years of experience.

In 2017, I noticed something a little ironic. UX and product people, despite being great at designing experiences for other people, often struggle to design their own careers. That’s why I created Career Strategy Lab and this podcast to help you navigate your UX job search, grow in your current role, and avoid skill and salary plateaus, all in a chill and BS-free way.

So whether you’re stuck in your job search or wondering what’s next in your UX career, you’re in the right place. I want to start by defining a term I’m going to use in this episode, the idea of career maximalism. And it’s not something that people normally call themselves, but this behavior is everywhere. Career maximalism is when your job becomes a major source of your identity.

It’s when your emotional state rises and falls based on how work is going, how people perceive you at work. It’s when feedback feels really personal. It’s when problems feel heavier than they need to. And it’s when work becomes the main source of where you get your validation, meaning, or even your self-worth. And this is not about how many hours you work.

You can still work a reasonable number of hours and still be a career maximalist. Career maximalism is really about emotional over-investment. And here’s the really tricky part. It often looks like being a really good employee, the person that people would love to have on their team, but

Sarah Doody (02:14.894)

There are a lot of risks that come with this idea of career maximalism. So I wanna dive into them today. So the thing with career maximalism is that it’s actually rewarded in the workplace, right? Especially earlier in your career. You’re almost trained to become a career maximalist. People who are career maximalists might say they are passionate or deeply committed or they really care or they take ownership and

Managers love that, right? Who doesn’t want someone that’s committed and passionate and takes ownership. Teams love this, right? Organizations reward people for this. So at first, this idea of career maximalism doesn’t seem like it’s a problem. It looks like it should be an in-demand trait for candidates and people on your team. But there is a point when caring too much stops helping you

in your career. So there’s this tipping point, let’s say, when caring too much actually starts to work against you. And this happens when feedback that you’re given starts to feel like rejection, or maybe small problems feel catastrophic, or you feel offended when someone gives you feedback instead of curious, let’s say.

Maybe you find yourself defending issues instead of trying to solve them and every problem feels urgent and emotional and you’re just constantly trying to figure out at the end of the day, does everyone like me? Am I in the good books of the people on my team? Those are all signs of career maximalism reaching a really dangerous tipping point. And at that point,

This caring trait, it doesn’t actually make you work better because it clouds your judgment and it slows down your decision making and it makes everything heavier than it needs to be because you’re constantly second guessing and third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh guessing everything you type into Slack, every email, every meeting, every phone call, you’re just constantly second guessing everything.

Sarah Doody (04:36.111)

and trying to figure out if what people are saying is at face value or if there is alternative meaning there. And you frankly start to get a little paranoid and that is not a healthy way to work. And there’s this distinction between being committed in your job versus being emotionally over identified in your job. And I wanna talk about that for a sec. So this idea of commitment sounds like, you know,

I want to be really good at this. I’m invested in this outcome for this project. Emotional over-identification could sound like this reflects who I am personally. This says something about my worth. And committed people can hear feedback and adjust. And over-identified people perceive feedback as a

threat. And once your nervous system is activated, logic really disappears, right? Because if you’re familiar with the nervous system, we have fight, flight, freeze, etc. And you’re no longer solving a problem. You’re then in protection mode. And in this case, you’re really protecting your identity when your nervous system is activated. When

You are over identifying with your job and for example, perceiving feedback as a threat. And that is not a good place to be operating in your job or on your team. So the real hidden cost of career maximalism is resilience. That is the hidden cost. And resilience really comes from having more than one place to put your meaning and your self worth.

This idea of career maximalism, it really collapses everything into one bucket, right? Your identity, your validation, your purpose, your sense of success, et cetera. And then when work goes sideways and it always does, you don’t just have a bad work day, you feel like a failure. You feel shaken, you replay conversations over and over, you feel anxious and defensive and drained, and that is not because you’re weak.

Sarah Doody (06:57.761)

It’s because you have too much riding on this one thing, such as your job. And I wanna give you an amazing example of this. There’s this thread on Reddit called treating UX as a job instead of an identity. And I’m gonna read a bit of it to you. It says, I’m over two years into my full-time career as a UX designer. And I sometimes wonder if there’s something wrong with me because I don’t make UX a hobby outside of work like a lot of my peers.

I’ve noticed a lot of designers, either coworkers or people on LinkedIn, et cetera, who are constantly reading or writing UX blogs and books, listening or creating UX podcasts, attending or speaking at UX conferences, writing social media posts. And the person goes on and on and lists a ton of activities. And then this person says, this stands out to me because I’m not aware of other fields with online communities where people obsess with work.

outside of work. And software engineers typically don’t do any of this stuff. The comments are really gold. I’m going to read a few of them too. Someone said, I’m like you. I have 14 years of experience as a designer about eight of them truly UX centric and I like it well enough, but UX design is my job, not my life. When 5pm rolls around, I’m doing something else with my free time. Someone else says,

Work stops when my paid time is up. That’s it. I know way too many people who have died young whose only life was work. Even more, who died old, regretted working their entire life, and worse, those who died just before retirement. Family, love, friends, travel, hobbies, gym, sports, adventure, expanding the mind. Few, if any of these, are behind a screen for me. If you’re aiming

to earn a ton of money, have a big house and a flashy car, then yeah, you probably need to hustle. But maybe you don’t need to. Some people want everything. More, more, more. And some people have enough. There is space for everyone, but it’s easy to see others and feel you need to be swept up in the race. I will link to this thread in the show notes if you want to read it, but

Sarah Doody (09:21.879)

I really found it fascinating because I don’t know about you, but when I log on to social media, especially places like LinkedIn, I see so many people really wrapping so much of their identity up around their job. And that just puts so much pressure on you, right? And it goes back to this idea of resilience. And in my own personal life,

I do so many things outside of my job. In the past years, decade or longer, I have taken up running marathons, for example. I do a lot of skiing when I’m not injured. I took up yoga. I started experimenting with cooking. I do so many things outside of my job. And one of the things that I love about all of these other things is the resilience

that it helps me create. If I’m, for example, running a marathon, not just running a marathon, training for the marathon, there is so much resilience that comes as a result of following a training plan for 16 weeks. Even when you wake up and you don’t wanna run that day, you kinda have to, because you signed up for the marathon, and if you skip an important part of your training,

you’re gonna pay for it on the race day. Cooking is another great example. Not everything I make turns out as planned. Sometimes it does and the New York Times reposts my Instagram posts of this stuff I cook, true story. But that trial and error that comes through things we do outside of our jobs helps just create this resilience. And the other thing I would say about resilience is that

You know, I was interviewed for this book years ago called Morning Routines. And one of the things I said in the interview was essentially how I really loved running early in the morning, especially when I lived in New York City, because no matter what happened the rest of the day, no matter what curve ball came my way or some idiotic thing someone said to me, it would just roll off my shoulders a little easier. I kind of had that

Sarah Doody (11:40.279)

resilience equity from earlier in the day when I went and like ran 10 miles and went over the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg bridges and back. those are some of the ways I’ve really cultivated this practice of resilience in my own career. And yes, earlier in my career, I was definitely a career maximalist.

I definitely had phases of taking things too personally, thinking that I needed to kind of like, I definitely had phases of taking things too personally, caring so much that it actually slowed me down because I was either paranoid to make a mistake or I was spending so much time trying to like figure out all the possible ways something could fail to kind of like have a contingency plan in place. That is not a good way to work.

It’s gonna slow you down and it’s gonna also obviously impact your mental health and your life outside of work. Because when you are down this career maximalist path, it means that the quality of your life outside of work also begins to suffer. Because if your self-worth and your identity and your validation and your purpose and your perception of success,

is all wrapped up in your job and you feel like you’re failing, what’s gonna happen in your personal life? You’re not gonna be able to shake that probably. And your friends and your family and relationships are all gonna suffer because of that. So I wanna leave you with three ways to care about your work without making it your identity. Is to build tip one, build proof of your self-worth outside of your job.

Similar to I just talked about in my own life with my own hobbies, one of the fastest ways to reduce emotional over-investment is to build competence in other areas of your life. So think about, is there a physical challenge or goal you could take on? You wanna run a half marathon, you wanna start swimming, you wanna do a half triathlon, I don’t know, take up hiking, skiing, whatever, yoga. Think of maybe a physical goal.

Sarah Doody (14:05.037)

You could also think of a creative project. Maybe you’re going to do pottery or metalwork or cooking or sewing. Those are all ideas. Learn an instrument, right? Another great thing to think about is, is there a goal or a thing you could try to do that could involve other people, right? Because it’s great to pursue a goal on your own, but you’re more likely to actually follow through on that if there are other people

pursuing the same goal. So this might be easier with like physical things like joining a running group or a hiking group or a skiing group or a yoga community or something like that. But if you’re the type of person that knows you’re gonna do better when there is a little bit of accountability involved because other people are also counting on you to show up, then that may be something to consider too. Whatever you decide as your thing that you’re gonna pursue outside of your job though,

I want you to keep in mind that this is not about productivity. You’re not going to do it to make money. Whatever you decide to do though, the goal here is that you’re doing it just for fun. If it helps you in other areas of your life, that’s great, but you’re doing it for you. You’re doing it to develop this resilience muscle. I really believe that resilience is like a muscle. And when you go on that first run and you run your first mile,

and then you get up to two miles and five miles and eight miles. It does wonders, obviously physically, but also for mental and emotional health too. And the reason that we’re doing this is because when work is not the only place you feel capable, feedback at work hurts less. Negative situations at work won’t play over your head again and again again because

you are not wrapping up your whole identity in your job. Okay, the second tip is to practice emotional detachment without disengagement. So, you can be responsible without being emotionally fused and charged. So, for example, if something bad happens at work, instead of saying or thinking, what does this say about me? Think about questions like, well, what?

Sarah Doody (16:33.255)

is my role here. What is actually in my control? What is not in my control? What was I responsible for versus what is this person telling me they thought I was responsible for as an example, right? Detachment is not apathy. It’s actually clarity. When you can kind of separate emotions from reality in a situation at work,

It really gives you so much power because so many people that you work with are probably wrapped up in their emotions and they’re not thinking clearly. But when you can acknowledge emotions, but detach from them and think about things rationally, you’re gonna be able to make clearer, faster, more confident decisions without being emotionally fused. Okay, and the third tip.

is to ensure that for whatever you are responsible for, if you’re a manager, what your team is responsible for, that there are really clear standards and boundaries. Because when there are not clear standards and boundaries, there cannot be accountability, right? So what do I mean by clear standards and boundaries? We need to have clarity around like, we are going to reply to customer service emails within 72 business hours.

That is a standard and a boundary, right? Maybe you work in product design, you need to have standards and boundaries over, for example, what means a design is ready to be handed over to development. If there are not standards, then what you believe is ready may not align with what the developer thinks is ready. And then what’s going to happen? Everyone’s gonna get upset. People are gonna get pissed. It’s not gonna go well. Why? Because there weren’t standards.

and boundaries. This shift alone from getting away from vague responsibilities and being very clear about standards and boundaries will actually lower the emotional load dramatically because it will remove the guesswork, right? Let’s go back to that first example though. The customer service standard of getting back to people in 72 hours. Let’s say someone on your team doesn’t get back to someone for 90 hours. Okay, that just means

Sarah Doody (19:01.197)

they didn’t meet the standard. And then it’s up to that person to decide if they’re gonna take that personally and define their whole worth over this not living up to this standard, or if they’re gonna learn from that and think about like, okay, well, why did I take 20 extra hours to reply to that message? And what can I do in the future to prevent that from happening, right? That’s ideally what happens, but.

By having these standards in place, it helps take some of the emotional drama that can happen when we don’t have clear standards and boundaries. All right, so career maximalism. To recap, it is when your job becomes a major source of your identity. And when your emotional state rises and falls, maybe even on a daily basis, based on how your job is going, it’s also when feedback starts to feel personal.

problems feel really heavy and work becomes the main place that you get validation and meaning and self-worth. And this is dangerous because we can’t live a whole life if our identity is tied up in our jobs. Especially true if one day you’re all of a sudden let go from your job, that blow is going to feel so much harder because you haven’t just lost your job, you’ve also

lost your identity. So in order to care deeply about your job and still do a good job without making your work your identity, I really challenge you to think about expanding your interests, your hobbies, your friendships even outside of your job. And doing this will help develop identity and resilience that will be great for you as a person, but

can actually help you do a better job at work because there is such power in the resilience muscle and being able to kind of let things roll off your shoulder a little easier when crazy things happen at work. Because of course you care, but you’re not gonna take it so personally and not let it ruin your entire day or week. If work is the only place you feel successful, then

Sarah Doody (21:22.255)

everything at work is going to feel heavier than it needs to be. And caring deeply about what you do is admirable and it’s a great trait, but only when it is balanced with perspective and boundaries and identity outside of your job. Because your job is something you do, it should not be who you

All right, I will make sure to link to that Reddit thread in the show notes in case you want to give it a read. And I’m curious, do you consider yourself a career maximalist? Are you a recovering career maximalist? And what do you do to develop resilience and identity outside of your job? Let me know, either send me a message on LinkedIn, feel free to drop a comment if you’re watching this on YouTube or in the comments if your podcast player allows you to drop.

comments. Alright, and one more thing. I actually have another episode all about career minimalism. So if you found this interesting, I’ll make sure to link to the career minimalism episode and you can go find out more about that trend that is pretty popular right now with Gen Z. Alright, that’s all. I’ll talk to you later. Hey there, I just wanted to say thanks for listening to this episode all the way to the end. If you’re looking for links or resources mentioned,

visit careersstrategylab.com slash podcast to find this episode details and the details of the hundreds of other episodes. If you’re looking for help with your UX or product job search, you may want to consider checking out my program, Career Strategy Lab, where I help UX and product people just like you navigate unexpected challenges in their careers, whether that’s a layoff, trying to get promoted.

or getting hired without applying to hundreds of jobs. To learn more about that, just go to careerstrategielab.com and click UX Career Coaching at the very top. That’s all for today and I’ll see you next time in another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.