Tell the truth: you have a crush at work.
Not on a person. Relax, HR is already holiday tired.
Your crush is on a role, a project, a new platform, a leader with a big slide deck and bigger promises. Something that walked into your professional life, tilted its head at just the right angle, and suddenly your brain started composing a rom-com about “the future of my career”.
The impossibility of attraction at work starts there. You see a shiny thing:
-A job posting that reads like destiny.
-A “transformational program” that will fix everything.
-A new system that “does it all”.
-A project that will “finally get you visibility”.
Instantly your imagination clocks in for unpaid overtime. You script it all.
-The glow up.
-The LinkedIn announcement.
-The seamless implementation.
Future you, calm and brilliant, sipping coffee while KPIs behave themselves.
Reality has not arrived yet, so it cannot contradict you.
That early phase is electric. You read everything. You ask questions. You volunteer for the steering committee. You attend the kickoff meeting like it is opening night on Broadway. Every slide feels meaningful. Every email has hidden promise. You are sure that this time it will be different.
Then the story starts to sag in the middle.
The job is still mostly meetings and status reports.
The “transformational” initiative keeps transforming its own scope.
The all-in-one platform requires three other platforms and a small interpretive dance.
Your “visibility” turns out to be extra work plus a CC line.
The fantasy version of the relationship collapses under the actual work.
Here is the uncomfortable bit.
The attraction was never really to the project, or the role, or the technology.
It was to the story you told yourself about who you would get to be if it all worked out.
That is not wrong. It is human. It just needs infrastructure.
This is where the SNAK filter walks in like the friend who gently closes your laptop and asks “Ok, but what are we really doing here?”
SKILLS: Will this stretch me in a direction I want, or just keep me busy and impressive looking?
NETWORK: Are these people I can learn from, build with, and be seen accurately by? Or is this a rotating cast of “stakeholders” who only appear at go-live and post-mortem?
ACTIVITIES: What will my calendar look like three months in?
KNOWLEDGE: What will I deeply understand by the end that I do not understand now? Industry insight. Customer behavior. Org dynamics. Myself… If nothing builds here, I am not in a relationship. I am in a loop.
You see, attraction at work is not the problem. Unexamined attraction is.
So, before you mentally elope with the next “once in a career opportunity”, grab your SNAKs and interrogate the fantasy. Let the crush stay fun but make the commitment sober.
I am curious: What is a project, role, or tool you once had a full-blown professional crush on that did not live up to the daydream?
