Career Blues

I have decided it is time for change!  Not change for the sake of change but deliberate, purposeful change in my career path.  I want to get off this beaten path and pursue what I love to do, train to be the best I can be, and then do it everyday.  I want to be my own boss and I want to write and I want someone to pay me lots of money to do it!  There, that’s a start on the path to change; direction mixed with tenacity and a dash of ignorance equals endless possibilities.  It trumps being a defeatist and committing to sheer boredom for the rest of my waking years….that last statement may have been gratuitously dramatic but it is how I’ve been feeling.

The career blues crept up on me, a midlife crisis of sorts.  Not a fully fledged breakdown, more of a slow disintegration into self-pity and I’m not particularly a fan of self-pity.   Recently I started to wonder what I have accomplished.  I mean what have I truly done to make a difference, to save someone, to be the best at something?  Naively I thought that it would all miraculously fall into place because for a long time it seemed like the puzzles pieces aligned and the last step led to the next which was somewhere meaningful and fulfilling.  The trajectory made sense but it doesn’t anymore and I’m feeling better and better about demanding more.  For a while I have been searching and scrambling for any semblance of direction and asking myself that resoundingly hollow question “Is this it??” but now it’s time to stop asking and start doing.  The answer is “No, this is not it.  This is merely a stepping stone.” 

I became immersed in the story of Steve Jobs’ life this week; this isn’t a bad thing in my opinion.  Much of the world rightfully mourns him as a bright spot on a dusky horizon with innovation tucked in his pocket or under his arm.  I glommed on to that feeling of loss and connected to it and then realized that the healthier approach was not to mourn the demise of my career (definitely too dramatic) but to pursue the future.  I fear that for a time there I let myself succumb to what Steve Jobs warned against - being trapped, not just by the opinions of others but by my opinion of myself.  I have not retraced all the steps that took me to a place where I no longer believed I was more capable.  To a large degree I think I put things on hold while I was finishing my Master’s degree and have not jumped back in the game since then.  The obvious irony is that I embarked on that journey aspiring for more and by the time I graduated I didn’t know what more meant.  

I want to share the words that jolted me.  They felt like cold water being splashed in my face and a poke to the ribs.  They hurt because I had become ambivalent and expected success while exerting less effort.  They are widely quoted words from Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement address but they bear repeating, “No one wants to die.  Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.  And yet death is the destination we all share.  No one has ever escaped it.  And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.  It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.  Right now, the new is you.  But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.  Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true.  Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart, and intuition.  They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” 

Words to live by!