Have you ever wondered?
Have you ever wondered if you’ve screwed up your career path? Like, say for example you were working somewhere that you loved initially, and then circumstances changed, and the job got so unsatisfying that you had to find a new job. And the new job sounded like a really good deal, a chance to exercise your skills, to help your new company find success in a new arena, to sharpen your business mindset. And the job was really good to begin with, and you had amazing colleagues with some really interesting work. But then you found yourself doing less and less of the tasks you were interested in, and more and more of the things you had hoped to leave behind in your old job. You couldn’t step back. You couldn’t take stock. You started getting worried. You started getting nervous. You stopped loving work and started fearing going in, because you felt that every victory was met with five more crises that you had no control over. So you start looking for jobs again. But everything you see advertised you play over and over in your head, reading up on the companies and realising that they’ll be just as corporate and restrictive as any of the roles you’ve worked before. You realise that you’re not suited for working in an office, in a corporation, in the modern world. You begin to worry that you’ll never be able to move on, either by lack of opportunity or fear of letting your colleagues down.
Have you ever wondered if you might be better off working for yourself? Like, say for example you have a set of skills that you don’t have the pieces of paper to prove that you can do them, but a good body of work to demonstrate your ability. And you’ve identified a gap in the market that you can exploit to your advantage. And so you begin formulating a plan, one that takes into account the both need for you to work to survive and your desire to grow as an artist and a creator. But something nags you, at the back of your head. Are you just trying to escape responsibility from your current job? If you can’t handle the stress in this job, how can you handle the stress from running your own business? Will anyone even buy your service? Will you be able to survive? How will it look on your CV if you can’t support yourself and have to get another corporate job?
Have you ever wondered why it’s important to you that you have a respectable job? Like, say for example you found yourself in the extremely fortunate position where you could survive on a lower income job and still save some cash, where there might be less stress, where you could just leave work at work and not be worried about the next day, week, month, year. A job where you could easily say ‘I just do that for the money, I’m really working on my novel.’ But then you meet up with your friends from university. They’re moving up the corporate ladder, earning money, earning prestige. You know that’s not what you want – but something still eats away at you. The feeling that you need to keep up with them, that achieving anything less is failure and that you have only yourself to blame.
Have you ever wondered if you just don’t know how to be happy in a job?
M.
(Warning: contains venting and undirected thrashing around.)
In answer to your questions: yes, yes, yes… well, you get the idea.
You have my phone number; just saying.
If you try and score yourself against someone else’s life you will “lose”, just as they would “lose” if they scored against yours. For example, your abilities at drawing, painting, and playing music all leave me miles in the dust. Your drive to write, act and generally create dwarf my much smaller pile. Your larger, more active social circle reminds me of the things I’ve screwed up in that area. Your cooking points to my lack in that area. Your…
Gah. Again, you get the idea.
And so what if you went and worked for yourself and your independent star-tup failed? Most start-ups fail – http://www.financialpreneur.com/?p=41 – but if I were hiring someone and they talked about the lessons they learned from their failed start-up, where they had done things wrong, where they had simply been unlucky – and luck is a *huge* factor in such things – then that wouldn’t count against them. Depending on the situation it might even be a great asset – knowledge of some of the pitfalls in the road ahead.
So what is it you’re really after? If you want to focus on being independent and happy at work then starting your own company will give you control. If you want to focus on creating things outside your work then a simple job that doesn’t burn up your creative energies, maybe one with reduced hours, and a bollocks-to-the-hugely-comfortable-pay-cheque-I’m-surving-here, will give you time to focus on that. If you want to play the corporate-ladder-success game then start stripping away other things to focus your time and energy on that all-important career. If you want everything, recognise that by not focusing on any one thing you aren’t focusing on any one thing. Generalists aren’t as good at things as specialists.
But then I suspect you’re a bit like me, and not really sure what you want. That’s fine. It’s more than fine, it’s pretty much the typical human condition.
I know this advice will be difficult, I know I mostly fail to manage it myself, but bugger it, here goes: stop being so f*cking hard on yourself. You are already a complete and most excellent person. It doesn’t matter if you do X or Y, you will still be a complete and most excellent person. It doesn’t matter if you screw up, or if you don’t. You know why? Because you’re *already* a complete and most excellent person.
And if you disagree I’ll come up there and kick your ass 😀
What fallible said…SWMBO is currently going through something similar (if you could call 5 years of human resources NOT doing their job similar).
Frankly, I think I’m just not cut out for an office job – Unfortunately, I’m able to ‘fake it’. Coupled with my natural desire to keep everybody happy, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster right there. I’m really trying to fend off out-of-hours work right now, but for some reason I keep on getting asked to do things or help with things. I mean yay, faith in me, but I’m only one person and I don’t get to go home and have a rest, I gots me art to do!