If you find that you have Sales or Management people with different agendas wearing you down, find a different team, or better yet a much MUCH smaller one. If you find yourself working in a team of five people total, you should have a very different experience.

If you can’t find a team like this, start one. I’m sure you have smart friends with grand ideas. Right now we live in a world absolutely filled with potential for young talented groups of people. Super-saturated in fact. The trick isn’t to have the best idea, or even to be the first to market. The trick is to be the first to hit the front page of digg.

We work in one of the only environments where the entire industry is literally at our fingertips.

If these tips don’t do it for you, try Sales or Management. Seriously! Or try customer training. Or UI design. Or anything else. Get outside your comfort zone.

If you can’t get the coding zen you wish to reach at work, don’t try. Do something else and then create a great Open Source project when you get home.

@Mike – That’s quite a good advice from your dad. It’s pretty bad to get stuck in a job one doesn’t enjoy, but it takes action to truly realize that fact and take steps to change the situation. I’m glad that you’re heading in the right direction, and things seem to be working out for you and your family

@Bashar – you’re right, the economic differences in the world might not allow the same idealistic opportunity to all. At the same time, the internet blurs out a lot of the borders, allowing for online freelance work from virtually anywhere in the world. Good luck with reaching your objective

What I figured out is, at least here in Kuwait and most Arab countries, if you really want to do the correct thing, work hard and do your best, you will be swimming against the current. My objective now is to find a job with short working hours, no on call or late nights of work, the focus on my free time to learn, work, enjoy and do freelance online business. My last 1 month leave I started enjoying working again, I was working on my own. so by doing this, hopefully, i will get the dot in the middle of the two axis.

I am aiming to get back to the light side though as I’ve been looking for another job. I fell into the trap of doing a demanding job, which got repetitive. I didn’t enjoy it anymore and I’m not getting paid enough for it. It doesn’t leave me with enough hours in the day to get into the fun stuff which I like to do. My dad said to me once, “don’t work for money son, that’s the fools way. Do what you love and you’ll always get what you need.”

Since making the choice to leave my current job it’s been as if a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders (cliched I know) and now it is so much easier to deal with. I hadn’t realized how soul-crushingly depressed I was until I made that choice either.

The signs were all there. I’d would have MSN up when I was at work, and Outlook, and RSS Bandit. I would sit sometimes and stare at the clock in the system tray just waiting for some application to “toast” and provide me with a welcome distraction from dealing with my job tasks. If it didn’t happen quickly enough I’d just go WILFing through google.

That’s not fair on me or the clients I worked with. And it certainly isn’t fair for my employer. Now that I’ve made the choice, I’m more productive at work, I’m participating in some online communities (like this one), my blog is active again, and I’m researching technologies and techniques which interest me. I’m even thinkin about writing an article or two.

Perhaps even more important, my family has me back again. I’m slowly becoming the fun-loving guy I was when I first got married and had kids. I haven’t been him for nearly a year. Nice to know he wasn’t dead.