Why Are You Doing This?

Eventually you need a reason bigger than money

The year is coming to a close and I’m getting all retrospective and trying to think about how to wrap this year of writing. I keep coming back to this question of motivation in careers and why we do the things we do for so long. Is it money or fear of trying something new, or do many of us just love our little and important world of chemistry?

When I graduated in 2009, I just wanted to get a job during the “greatest recession since the Great Depression.” From 2009-2012 I worked a pretty good job for an interesting start-up and then I went to graduate school. I thought chemistry was cool and fun, but it wasn’t a strong part of my identity just yet.

After I defended my thesis in 2016 and an intense four years of studying and research, I had a job lined up (pro tip: don’t schedule your defense till you get a job). I’ve been working steadily since the summer of 2016 with my PhD since then and I’ve come to the conclusion that having a good reason for doing what you are doing is important. Just wanting a job because its 3-4x your graduate school salary wears off quick. After all, you learn to spend what’s in your pocket.

Working a job for money is normal. It’s noble in some ways even, but I think by itself it is a terrible motivator. If you are reading this newsletter as a scientist, an engineer, or aspire to be one with thoughts of being rich then I’ve got some bad news.

It’s not that it cannot happen over time or if you found a start-up and achieve a lucrative exit. It’s just unlikely and thus, I think it can be a really tough area if you are just here for the money. If you wanted a lot of money, I think there are other more lucrative careers such as being a lawyer, doctor, finance and investment banking, consulting.

Money enables modern life, but is chasing the dollars going to keep you in the career long term? I think you need more reasons. Let’s think about it.

Find Your Reasons

Money only ever took me so far and when my salary started to stagnate, I’d just hop to the next gig. The problem with this is you soon start to approach your limit. Early career chemists with a PhD in a non-pharma role I think tend to top out around $130-140k/year in total compensation. If you want to go higher you need to become a technical fellow or a manager of people. It’s tough to get those roles these days because they are becoming rarer, and I think those jobs are becoming more difficult.

Money tends to stop being important when you feel unsafe too.

I distinctly remember going to South Dakota to run a trial in a factory that had been shut down supposedly by my company’s products. I got delayed getting there due to a bomb cyclone and then after a harrowing drive in a storm that went from rain to ice in the blink of an eye in a rental car I got to the town. Ran the trial the next day and figured things out (it wasn’t my product’s problem), but a blizzard had descended over the town during the day, and I was stuck for another night. When people from South Dakota tell you that you shouldn’t drive in the snow you should probably listen.

The next morning, I found that there were no flights leaving from the airport I flew into, so I ended up getting a flight out of MSP, but I had to drive 3 hours east to get to the airport. For half of that drive, I guided my little Hyundai Elantra across an ice-covered “main road.” I think in that moment I realized that I wasn’t doing my job for the money, but I didn’t have any other good reasons to be doing it either at that moment. Why was I doing all of this stuff to end up coming up with a solution for a problem that wasn’t mine to solve in the first place and risking my life in the process?

The best reasons I ever had for being a professional chemist in the industry was that I was doing the job mostly to keep the operators and the people who worked in the plant employed and trying to make products a bit more sustainable wherever I could. I’ve always felt like I’ve been able to figure out my next opportunity, but if you’ve ever spent a lot of time in a chemical plant or factory you might realize that a lot of people don’t have that same luxury and sometimes that job as an operator is the best job in the area that they could get.

Ensuring the successful launch of a new product and its long-term success (technical service) is often the chemist’s job. You support your customers. You support your plants. Your company’s executives and shareholders get taken care of as a benefit and you get to keep your job and your salary. It’s just that sometimes investor and shareholder value is often the only priority and your side dreams of sustainability get washed away a bit.

I think if you want to stay in the chemical industry for the long haul you need to figure out why you want to do it and it cannot be for the money. If you want a lot of money, just try to figure out how to break into the private equity industry or go become a patent lawyer. If not saying you need the “this company aligns with my core values” mission reason but knowing why you want to do this stuff is important and it’s going to get you through the brutal layoffs, the shitty commute when your friends are remote, and when your supply chain blows up and everything is on fire.

Knowing why before you go into something is helpful too. When I started, it was 100% about sustainability and getting stuff to market that was more sustainable than the old stuff. The longer I worked the more I realized how hard it was to make something “sustainable,” and that term is loaded with different meanings to different people. A CEO might view sustainability as something completely different than a chemist or a chemical engineer.

Guess who wins on the definition game.

Tony