2-3-4 Friday: Why we quit too fast, and start too slow 

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1 thought

A year ago, when The Hour Glass, a luxury watch retailer was having its Annual General Meeting, its CEO said, “My mission is to ensure the long-term survivability of The Hour Glass.” One would have thought he was joking, especially after he surpassed $1 billion in revenue.

A month ago, I had made a big bet that could result in my company, and myself, being bankrupted. A senior mentor told me, “If you wanted my advice, I would say, ‘just live to fight another day’.”

Live to fight another day. Just survive.

Doesn’t this seem like un-ambitious, boring advice?

Two weeks ago, a social work student came to ask for life advice - about whether she should continue pursuing social work, when the systemic flaws, the salaries, didn’t make much sense.

I said, “well, I quit. You can make your own decision.”

Please don’t get me wrong.

I’m not here to ask you to quit counseling, social work, or whatever social care job you do. But I’m here to say, that sometimes, when you can’t change the system or find a part of the system that you can thrive in, leaving, so that you can live, makes a lot of sense.

Many of us look for the high points of a career, and see the upside, but we don’t properly plan for the absolute downside in our careers, in the parts we have little to no control over.

Things like:

1. Getting sacked tomorrow because your boss hates you
2. Finding your job made increasingly redundant because people assume AI can do your job, even though it can’t
3. Finding that the social care system is the same 10 years from now, and you finding it even more frustrating

Yes we are built to worry about what happens individually, but we aren’t built to solve our existential, systemic worries.

It’s why things like climate change still haven’t been solved even though people have been talking about it for decades.

Credit: Tong Yee

That’s because climate change happens on a systemic level, and is not easily controlled on an individual level.

So the question is,

whatever you’re struggling with, at which level of the system is it happening at?

Is it something you can really change?

Is it something you have the power to change?

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It isn’t about being the change you want to see, but recognizing what change you can actually see.

You can’t sit on the ground and complain about boredom, when up in the trees, you might just find monkeys singing.

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Back to the advice I gave to that social work student.

I can’t quite remember the advice now, but I can remember the distinct line that sharpened my awareness of what my problem with the sector was.

On the last day of my social worker job, my colleague gave me a farewell lunch. She said,

John, the problem is not that you treat this as more than a job.

It’s that others treat it as just a job.

Some people call social work a calling, a vocation, a life’s passion. I had that starry-eyed ideal too, but it got dimmed by the time I was in social work.

For those who stay in this noble career, I think it’s vital to focus on what you can do, in the small ways you can.

The time where you can have a quiet conversation with a child; or the time when you stand by the door during a home visit, and you smell the delightful soup the mother is brewing for the baby; or the time when you can just walk out of the counseling room and left someone with a bit more hope.

Because when you step back and look at what’s happening in the wider field, it can feel frustrating that things move slowly, even though they are moving.

Ultimately in sustaining a job, I don’t think it’s just passion.

It’s also pace.

It’s what pace you want to go at. I wanted things to move, I wanted to learn faster, I wanted to not be confined.

But that may not be you.

If you’re thinking of quitting, sometimes it helps to think of the current pace of your life. It's not wrong to slow down, follow the rhythm, rather than operating as if you were in a Ferrari, racing down your career. 

There's nothing wrong with being slow. Because you might just be able to follow the pace, and quickly ramp up when the entire system is ready. 

Ever seen an orchestra? Everything comes together at the right time, at the right place. 

Sometimes it takes more wisdom to recognise when everything is coming together, slowly and steadily, and to quietly know that yourself; than it is to just recognise and complain about the problem to anyone who would listen.

And yes, I was wrong to quit too fast. 

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love