What Did I Want To Do?

Your fear inspires your complacency and is the core of your loyalty to the organization and all its demands. Dissatisfaction with a fancier title and a bigger bonus can still be dissatisfaction. So it’s essential to look hard at the direction and effectiveness of the mobility you can achieve, versus detouring into a career change. After enduring this restart process, you may realize that several tweaks can actually optimize your current situation such that a full detour may not be necessary. They count on the assumption that you are content in your pretty good job at a pretty good salary and that, clearly, the last thing you would ever want to do is risk losing that job. Organizations count on that. I know that my complacency during my decade in corporate America showed up in my being overly loyal to my boss, whoever he or she was at the moment. Put me wherever you want to put me, assign me whatever task you can, move me to whatever location you decide, and I’ll do everything you ask. And I did. Call it loyalty to the nth degree. How does your company repay you for your willingness to be loyally complacent? In the corporate world, security in return for complacency is simply not part of the package, and there isn’t a contract that can’t be broken or renegotiated. It really means that you’re always a free agent who can be let loose at any time into the big, wide marketplace, looking for the next possibility.

Deep Deep Feeling

All it takes is one mistake, one foot put wrong for one minute. Anyone can get axed. And that scary risk of the unknown quite simply frightens many of us away from the very idea of making a change. So we stay complacent until it just no longer seems possible, not if we’re going to feel alive at all. In fact, management wanted to take advantage of that, to use my celebrity to represent the brand. Ten years of commitment to the job and the organization, consistently excellent performance reviews, four relocations to three different states, even extending my own public celebrity to the bank’s advantage might just as well never have happened. Just like that, I was dropped like a deadweight for a remark someone else made on a podcast! Any lingering doubts I may have had about cutting the cord and restarting my career and my life went out the door that same second. Ever hear the expression, With friends like that, who needs enemies? My sentiments exactly. As you examine your own situation and your own relationship to the organization you work for, let my sudden free agency serve as a reminder to take a cold, hard look at any fears or sense of reluctance you may have about making a change. Like many clichés, it’s also true. To care about the work you do, to be motivated by it, and to invest yourself in it is to feel every day that you are in the right skin and have found the right life for you. What did I want to do? I always regretted working for a bank where I couldn’t keep an eye on the action on Wall Street during the day.

Make It Like A Memory

My life today involves both of those passions. I have an investing app that people can use both to learn about investing and to do it. I also work with a number of small businesses on the rise, and I consult every day for hundreds of other people involved in all sorts of business. I’ve become something of an educator on the subject. So, today, I am absolutely living my passion. The difference in my life between now and my ten years in corporate America could not be more sharp or more welcome. Would another position or another company have saved me back then? Would it have freed me to get back in my own skin and love my work? It’s not unlikely, and it’s not important for our purposes. What matters is making the change that’s right for you. Follow your passion, and you can’t go wrong. I’m the living proof. I’m excited every night to think about waking up the next morning, and when I wake up, I’m excited to get going, to do the work, to be with the people I get to work with. The handcuffs are off, I’m free, I’ve never been so involved in something that occupies me so completely, and I’ve never been happier.

One More Chance

It showed me that I at least understood my skill set issues and that I had a pretty sensible approach to my discontent about compensation. It spelled out for me that my mobility worries and my fear of the unknown were indeed holding me back from making a change, until the passion issue pushed me over the edge of my dissatisfaction and compelled me to make the change that, in my view, has saved my life. It also showed me that, in my case at least, the change was going to have to be radical. You’ve talked to your friends, you’ve talked to your family, you’ve talked to yourself. Hopefully, you have also compared and contrasted their perception versus your reality. You’ve identified the issues that are the source of your career dissatisfaction and the issues that are keeping you from making the change you want to make. You now know which of the five issues point you to that change and define the nature of the change. There are 168 hours in a week. In some of the many that remain after you have assured continuing employment, you will want to work on your external strategy, figuring out what excites you, what you really want to do in your life, what job or purpose will make you excited to get out of bed in the morning. By the time the Seattle job came my way, I knew that what I wanted was to get out of corporate banking.