Opinion
Get workplace news, advice and perspectives to help make your job work for you. Sign up for our weekly Thank God it’s Monday newsletter.
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a South Korean wave. From movies to music, fashion to beauty, this East Asian country is only around one-tenth the size of South Australia, yet it’s having a powerful cultural impact across the globe.
There is something else that Koreans excel at: coming up with poetically descriptive terms to sum up common feelings, like ‘nunchi’ (the ability to read the mood of a room) and ‘sseom’ (that flirting stage of a relationship when you both know there’s something there, but you’re not officially dating yet).
However, there’s a different Korean word that captures a particular place that some of us get to at work. The slang word for this is ‘goinmul’ – prounced ‘go-in-mool’ – and it translates literally into English as ‘stagnant water’. It describes someone who has been stuck in the same job for too long, and is beginning to almost rot away internally due to inaction.
The term was originally coined to refer to online gamers who had played the same game for so long that they had developed great skills in it, but were now stuck in a rut of their own making.
The same thinking applies to workplaces, where it’s common for some employees to become stagnant in their roles. Sure, they might know how to do their job with their eyes closed, but they also realise that something is missing and that they’ve overstayed their welcome.
There are many benefits that come from experience and staying put, but they need to be balanced against remaining still for too long.
I recently wrote about ‘job hugging’, the new Australian trend where people are staying in their jobs for longer due to uncertainty about the future. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia’s job mobility rate, or the number of people who changed jobs that year, has fallen from 9.6 per cent in 2023 to 8.0 per cent in 2024 and 7.7 per cent in 2025.
Add this to historically high disengagement levels in Australian workplaces, and you have the perfect recipe for a growing number of workers who feel like they are stuck.
Now, there’s a simple question you can ask yourself to determine whether you fall into this bucket: ‘when was the last time I learned something genuinely new at work’? This is not about working hard or feeling stressed in your job, it’s whether you’re still discovering fresh skills and new ways to approach your job so you feel like you’re moving forward.
If you couldn’t answer that question without having to rewind several years to remember a time when you learned something new, you’re a suitable candidate to be a ‘goinmul’. There’s no point in waiting for someone else to pull you out of this position, as unfortunately, you’re going to have to do that for yourself.
There are three simple steps to freshen things up within your current role. The first is to simply recognise that this is how you’re feeling. It can be a natural place to accidentally find yourself after giving a lot to a business, so don’t be too harsh if you recognise yourself in it.
The second step is to push your current job as far as you can to its edges. Find new projects, clients, colleagues or opportunities that can help stretch you without having to entirely change companies. Raise it with your manager in your next catch up that you’re open to expanding your skills and show a willingness to learn new things, even if they’re hard.
Lastly, look outside your job and see what new skills you can add to your life. It could be a new language, online course, in-person workshop, or anything that’s going to stimulate your brain in a new area. Learning doesn’t always need to be directly related to your role, but anything that expands your mind is going to eventually reflect on your work as well.
There are many benefits that come from experience and staying put in a job, but they need to be balanced against remaining still for too long. The single best way to keep you or your job from turning into ‘stagnant water’ is to keep moving.
It can be slowly, steadily, or even frantically at times, but as long as you’re progressing in some small way, you can stop everything around you from getting stale.
Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. He co-founded Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET.
