Career and Life Advice You Must Ignore
‘Just stick with it’
When we are doing something and we express doubt due to our lack or suitability, enjoyment or love for something people often tell us to give it a chance. Wait it out and you will see the errors of your ways.
Don’t be hasty and live with regret.
You haven’t given it long enough to know for certain. If we have given it less than 12 months we are to give it a full year or less than two we should wait for the second. The wisdom perpetuated is this: ‘what difference will 6 months make?’.
Promotion might just be round the corner if we work a bit harder. Soon you’ll get a wage increase and all your worries will evaporate.
Give yourself an opportunity to avoid making a mistake.
It won’t look good on your CV. Job hopping will dissuade future employers from hiring you as they will have trepidations about your lack of commitment.
So we buckle up and remain comfortably unhappy. We fall into the trap of assuming things will improve irrespective of whether we want them to or not. We were ready and excited to write the next chapter on our journey but always when we are ready to make the leap do we have the most doubt.
We listen to the advice of others. We believe anecdotes of how things began to look up only after a certain period of time. We hear that we will get to know the people better which will make us love our job. Or we hear that it’s not the job that is the problem, if only you had another boss.
But what if the job was never fulfilling and it never will be, what if it fails to stimulate or challenge you sufficiently, what if it makes you lose the will to live?
People hurtle through life perfectly miserable due to the choices they have accepted but not made. We allow other people to alter our intentions with no reason or understanding as to why we wished to make that change in the first place.
Cognition of a problem is the first step to recovery, external.relapse advice is like
The only basis for their argument is due to something which has been accepted as conventional wisdom, it’s better to stay in a job for an accepted length of time, with little evidence it is the truth. Why do we trust the things others believe above our own feelings?
So we remain in that dead end job, we accept that bad relationship or we continue to do something which wastes the precious time we have been afforded.
And that is the irreparable damage it does.
Time is the only consistent in life.
It is the string which has tied the past to the present and it is what will stretch into the future as we continue our relentless march forward.
Every second you waste now compounds to influence your future course. It influences the things we can do and the experiences we can choose to have.
If you waste time doing things you hate, in a job or with people that you don’t want to be with, at best the only thing you can achieve is prolonging the time until you get what you want.
At worst you can expend a lifetime’s effort trying to solve an impossible solution.
Sometimes the only option is to admit defeat. Sometimes trying is only for trying sake. In the end you cause more damage, to yourself, someone else and the company, than good.
So I ask myself two questions every morning:
- Am I happy?
- If today were the last day of your life, would you want to be doing what you’re doing?
If the answer to either has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Often that is work related but that can be equally applicable to my personal life.
I’m not advocating giving up on everything, or anything for that matter. What I am encouraging is a sincere, frank and honest retrospective assessment of the things you have decided and why.
Which is incredibly hard.
Can you be honest with yourself?
Do you appreciate the gravitas of the decisions you are making today and how they will alter your future course.
It takes tremendous bravery to recognise your own problems, inadequacies or the things making you terminally unhappy.
Where you have the opportunity to swallow the frog today in anticipation of a brighter future tomorrow I would make that decision every single time.
If you know that something isn’t right change it now, time won’t ever wait for you.
Life is about choices, but where people insist there may always be a right and a wrong decision I see far more shades of grey.
You can always put on a brave face ignorantly ignoring a difficult decision, hope can enable you to survive even the toughest times and sometimes things do change.
But typically it doesn’t and they won’t.
We can either control our destiny or allow our lives to mutate into something we never intended.
There are no right decision and other people’s opinions are irrelevant.
We have two choices: we can keep doing what we are doing or we can do what we want to do.
When what we are doing isn’t what we want to do never just stick with it.
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