The Introvert Leader Podcast shows professionals how to grow, lead with confidence, and stand out without selling out.
Hosted by Austin Hopkins, each episode breaks down the real challenges of leadership, career growth, and big career moments without fluff or corporate buzzwords.
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8:55
Why do you care so much about work? Why do you let it overtake every aspect of your life? Does caring more mean a better career? In this episode I'm going off script talking about why we care too much at work and what we can do about it.
Timestamps
1:53 – Caring Too Much Is a Lie: Hard work alone rarely translates to more money or faster promotions.
3:39 – Even Value Exchange: Are you giving more to your company than you are getting back?
5:11 – Risks of Caring Too Much: I started losing my hair because of work stress. This became the wake-up call I needed.
7:27 – Challenge: Ask yourself 2 questions. Will worrying about this detail change anything for my career? Can I choose not to care for the promise of less stress?
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I remember staying up till 12.30 in the morning adjusting the margins on a PowerPoint slide. I try to make it wider, try to make it narrower, I want to make sure this thing looks perfect. But why did I just stay up an extra couple of hours adjusting a slide that no one's gonna see? Why did I care so much? Why do I write the same email 10 times to make sure that it's perfect when no one's gonna care either way? I'm hyper focused on something no one cares about, and yet I can't stop. Today I want to talk about why we care about stuff so much at work, maybe how to stop.
Why does no one tell you that when you buy a fancy espresso machine? It's basically like buying a supercar. When it's working, it's amazing. Performance is awesome. You have the best cup of coffee ever, but the other half of the time, it's broken. It's in the shop, it needs repairs. This week, my fancy espresso machine has failed me. So I've been without good coffee. I've been having to lower myself to the status of a commoner and drink this swill, this drip coffee. It's okay. I miss my fancy espresso machine. The only goal for this update is I wanted to come across as out of touch as possible. So hopefully you are getting that, my friend. On a real note, I appreciate you listening to the show and supporting. If you'll do me a quick favor, click the subscribe button. I want to make sure you don't miss any content this year. In today's
episode, I'm kind of going off script. I don't necessarily have an agenda. I just kind of want to talk about why I care about work so much, what I've kind of struggled with around that, and what you can kind of do to stop. I think that's something a lot of us struggle with, especially high performers, high achievers. We care so much about work. We work ourselves to death, we become stressed out, and all in the name of making sure that our work looks perfect or making sure that our work is amazing. So caring too much is actually a lie. It's a lie we tell ourselves. We say the more I care, the better off my career will be, the more money I'll get paid, the more respect I'll get, the more people will like me. If I just care more, if I just work more hours, if I just devote more time to worrying about everything that's in front of me. And unfortunately, that's just not reality. I hate to say this and I don't want to come across as negative, but I don't care if you work as hard as you want this year. At the end of the year, you're most likely to get the same amount of arrays as all the people around you who are not working as hard as you. So all that time you're caring about the PowerPoint deck, about the email you're writing, about how you came across in that meeting, about what you said to that person in the hallway. Those things can be important to an extent, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really translate to any more money at the end of the year, which I know is kind of weird to think, right? We we we've kind of been led to believe by our employers that the harder we work, the more we care, the more incentive, the more pay we're gonna get. And that's just not how it works. Unfortunately, most of that stuff is all due to office politics. It's more about how we tell our story, how we show up versus the actual work that we're doing. And I think that's a big reason people kind of struggle with caring too much, is they really believe that if I care a ton, I'm gonna get better outcomes. And I just don't believe that's the case. So I remember lots of times where I worked my butt off during the air. I would work way more than I needed to. I followed up, I made sure I owned every process. I mean, I really exhausted myself to make sure that I showed up perfectly. And at the end of the year, I was met with a 3% raise. And I thought to myself, was all that really worth it? Was I really getting what I thought I would at the end of the year? The answer was no.
And something else that I think is interesting is kind of thinking about work as an even value exchange. So let's think about it this way. If I was buying a car and I spent $100,000 more than it was worth, that would not be an even value exchange, right? I'm overpaying for something, they're getting a better deal, I'm getting a worse deal. I think that same principle kind of applies to our work, right? So if I'm putting in a ton of work, I'm giving all of my loyalty, I'm beating myself to death just to make sure that we hit a quota, just to make sure that a project gets out on time. Am I really getting that value back? Am I seeing, you know, better career opportunities? Am I getting more money? Am I getting promoted faster? Am I getting back what I'm putting into it? And the answer is most of the time it's a no. I don't know why this is. You know, as someone who worked in corporate for 15 years, I believed that I owed my company some sense of deep loyalty and that I owed them everything and that they controlled my destiny, and that if I didn't give them everything I had, then I wasn't going to get back what I was owed. And unfortunately, that again, it just doesn't work that way. So I see people beat themselves up. I see clients go way above what they need to just to make sure that they show the company that they're engaged and they care. But the company couldn't give a shit. They don't pay you anything more, they don't treat you any different. So I think that's something that I've struggled with is realizing there needs to be an even value exchange, right? I don't need to give more loyalty than I'm given back, right? If they can fire me at any time, then I need to be okay with looking for other jobs and exploring what else is out there because I have no job security if they can let me go at any time.
So I think there's also some risks of caring too much. So it's like four or five years ago, I'm managing three departments. I'm working more hours than I should be. I am really trying to show up as perfectly as I can, right? I want to make sure that every meeting I attend, I am completely prepared. I have bullet points, I've got facts, I know my performance, like the back of my head. And I remember I'm at the barber one day and he's cutting my hair and he's looking at the back of my head and he said, Hey, Austin, I don't know if you know this, but you've got like two bald patches on the back of your scalp. And I was like, that's so weird. I mean, I don't even noticed that. And he's like, Yeah, man, you might want to go get that checked out by a doctor. So I kind of start panicking, schedule an appointment to go see a doctor, and she sits me down in the chair, and within about 30 seconds, she looks at it and says, Hey, Austin, are you stressed out at work? I take a beat and I'm like, Yeah, I'm pretty stressed out. This is probably the most stressed I've been in a while. And she says, Yep, I figured it. Looks like you have some stress-induced alopecia. So I started losing my hair because I was so stressed at work, because I wanted to care so much about how I showed up and how everything went. And I gotta tell you, losing your hair, and not that that's a big, huge health thing, but seeing a real effect of stress on your body is kind of a wake-up call. And I kind of started realizing, what in the hell am I doing? Why am I working so hard? Why am I caring so much that my health is suffering? Is this pay? Is this job that important that it overshadows my health as a human being? The answer, of course, was no. So I feel like for me, that was like a big wake-up call when it comes to not really realizing there are some real risks about caring too much. You know, you might think it's okay to just work a couple of extra hours, or you might think it's okay to skip your lunch or not go to the gym this week because, you know, you've got a big deadline. But those things add up, man. And over time, you start to see some real risks of worrying and caring too much about your work. Does that maybe mean you neglect your relationships? You know, are you not showing up as a husband or a wife the way you should, or as a parent the way you want to be? And that's just something I try to keep in the back of my mind as I go forward in my career, which is I don't want to care too much that it makes other things in my life suffer. Right? Work is important. Do not get me wrong. For a lot of us, work is our identity, right? That's how we measure our value in the world. But I think if we put too much focus on that, if we care too much, if we let that equation get out of balance, I think real stuff starts to happen that's kind of scary.
So at the end of the day, I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions. Here's your challenge for the week. Number one, will worrying about this detail change anything from my career? Will worrying about that extra PowerPoint slide? Will worrying about that email and how the tone came across, right? To a certain point, there's diminishing returns. The second question I want you to ask yourself is can I make the choice not to care for the promise of less stress? And if you can answer those two questions, there's a good chance that you're gonna be able to start getting that equation about how much you care and how little you care into the right
balance. P.S. If you want to spend one hour trying to figure out how to stop caring so much and what stuff to actually focus on, click the link in the description. I'd be happy to have a chat.
I hope you realize that if you're a top performer or if you're a high achiever, you're always gonna struggle with caring too much. And that's okay. And that's gonna help you out in the beginning, especially as you're trying to get your footing. But once you get to a certain point and you understand what your value is and you understand what you bring to the table, it's okay to change that equation. It's okay to stop caring so much and just focusing on the things that are in your control, worrying about the things you want to worry about, but not allowing everything that happens at work to overtake who you are as a person, overtake your life. Hopefully, you enjoyed me going off script today. I want to say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day.
