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This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in chief of.

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Entrepreneur Magazine, and I'm money expert Nicole Lapin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help callers solve their work problems.

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And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.

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And it starts now.

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You're ready for a change, but there's something you can't let go of. Maybe you're unhappy in your job, but there's some perk or status you stick around for. Maybe you're unhappy in a relationship, but there's some comfort or convenience you love, and it's why you stay. Maybe there's a project you want to quit, or an industry you're sick of. Whatever it is, you are ready to go, but you struggle to leave a small part behind which is pleasurable and meaningful, just hard to let go of. You keep asking yourself, is this worth staying for? Today, I'm going to help you answer that question, and I'm going to start with my own version of this problem. Are you ready to meet Drunk Party Jason? Oh yeah, Here we go. All right. A long, long time ago, I moved to New York at the age of 28 to take a junior editing job at Men's. I did not know many people in the city, and my evening plans were often pretty empty. And then the invitations started rolling in because here's the thing. When you're an editor at a big consumer magazine, you get invited to stuff. Movie premieres and concerts and swanky brand events. And at these events, colleagues turned into close friends. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife and I had great adventures. They formed the foundation of my social life and they made me feel cool and important. But there was a problem. After a while, I was kind of sick of Men's Health. The work had gotten boring and there was little room for growth. But every time I thought of leaving, I got scared because I didn't want the party invites to stop. After all, I was getting those invites because I was at Men's Health. Now, as I look back on that time in my life, I realized what those parties had become. They had started as a forward benefit, but they eventually became a dead end benefit. And if you are ever in this situation, then you better know the difference. All right, let's step back for a moment and before we define forward benefit and dead end benefit, let's just define benefit. Let's consider for a moment what a benefit is. Everything we do has some benefits benefit. You know, a job could have many benefits like the pay, experience, professional relationships, lifestyle status, access, whatever. The same is true for every relationship that you've been in and every project you've taken on and every commitment you have ever made. There is nothing wrong with benefits. There's nothing wrong with enjoying benefits. But every benefit comes with a sacrifice. The benefit is, is your reward for choosing one thing over another. For example, if someone has golden handcuffs, you know that phrase, golden handcuffs? Then what they're doing is choosing the benefit of a high salary and they're sacrificing some other pursuit. If someone enters a monogamous relationship, then they are sacrificing experiences with other people because they have chosen this one person. If someone works in the arts, then they might be choosing the benefits of passion over financial security. Hopefully for the people who are choosing these benefits, the sacrifice doesn't feel like much of a sacrifice. They have goals and they're clear eyed about those goals and they see how the benefits help them reach those goals. And if that describes you, then I would say you have a forward benefit. It is a benefit that drives you towards your goals. It moves you forward. But these calculations are not static. Benefits, sacrifices, and goals will all change. And if you're considering any kind of change, then it is worth asking yourself, is the benefit still worth the sacrifice or is the sacrifice now larger than the benefit? And here's the moment where all of this collided for me. So I'll take you back. Remember, I'm working at Men's Health. I'm now in my early 30s. I am bored, and I get a job offer at Fast Company. Fast Company, this cool business magazine. It would give me all this new opportunity, this room to grow as a writer and an editor. And it paid a lot better too. But I hesitated. I really, I really did. I wasn't sure what to do because you know, Fast Company, they don't write much about booze or movies, which means that I would lose my invites to those cool parties. And as silly as it sounds, that really hurt. I remember weighing my options, and then I made an important realization. When I needed to build a social life. The parties helped me do that. They really were a forward benefit. They were a benefit that was advancing my goals of having fun and building a social life and building a professional network. All of it was there forward benefit. But a few years later, I had a social life. I had great friends, I had professional connections, and I had plenty to do with myself. So I had developed new goals. It was time to really, truly focus on my career. And that meant the parties, they were just parties now. They didn't move me forward. They were a dead end benefit, which is a benefit that might be enjoyable, but that leads you nowhere new. The choice at that point was clear. I took the job at Fast Company. I left Men's Health. And you know what? My old friends from Men's Health, they still got me into a bunch of these parties until we actually all got bored of them. And then life moved on. Because that's another thing about these benefits. Even if you never lose them, you can outgrow them. So if you're considering a change and there's something you just cannot let go of, well, consider this. Change isn't just about loss. We often experience change as loss. We think about the things that we have, those comfortable, familiar, warm things, and how change will cause us to lose them. But change creates gain too. Even if it's harder to see at first. When you quit something, even if it's something that you've loved, you free up your time for other pursuits. A benefit should help you reach your goals. A benefit should not hold you back from goals. The benefits that you enjoy today are not the only benefits that you will ever have. There are more of them wherever you go. They will take different forms and they will serve different purposes. And if you are intentional about your choices, then those new benefits will provide what you need now and tomorrow and not just what you needed yesterday. And as you may know, if you listen to this podcast often enough, that came from my newsletter. My newsletter is called One Thing Better each Week. One way to be more successful and satisfied at work and build a career or company that you love. I send it out each week. You can subscribe at One Thing Better email One thingbetter email. That's a web address where you can get them early and in written form. And some other goodies as well. Or just stay tuned here at Help Wanted because I read them on this podcast as well. So it's really a choice of where you want to get your One Thing Better benefit. Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.

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Pfeiffer and me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoy. Do you want some help? Email our helpline@help wantedoneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show and follow us on Instagram at Money News and Tik Tok Money News Network for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance?

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Oh, I didn't sign up for that.

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All right, well, talk to you soon.

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Sam.