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Was quitting my job a mistake?
 

Q: Mike,
I quit my job because I felt that the work and the culture and the lifestyle of my profession were at odds with me personally, emotionally, and spiritually. I felt exhausted and a little sick to my stomach every day.  However, I do not have another job.  I felt like I needed to move on anyway - to give myself time to think about "work" that would better suit me.  In some moments I am just terrified by my decision.  In others I feel like I have followed my heart and my gut and that accordingly, I must be headed in the right direction.  I guess my question is: was leaving my job without another plan a "bad" move?  In other words, have I just made things more difficult for myself?  In your tapes you say if you don't know what it is you want to do, stick with what you're doing.  And I keep thinking about that now!  But my career is one that demanded most of my waking hours and I just felt so drained, I felt like I needed to stop that immediately to begin living the life of my dreams.  It seemed so clear to me that I needed to leave.  But now sometimes I wonder if the life of my dreams would have found me even if I just stuck it out in my job, if I had just done my best to be positive and waited.  Have I messed up?
 

A: I did say stick with it, but I also told the story in one of my programs of how I quit Price Waterhouse without a clue. To me, and perhaps for you, while I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I knew passionately what I didn’t want to do, and taking that step was all important.

Combined with that step, for me, was an unbridled, very active quest to get going again in a new direction, and so I knocked on every door, read books, bought magazines, went to tradeshows, and put as many sticks in the fire as I could. I never waited for inspiration to come to me, but went out to find it. 

If you busy yourself with determination, vision, and expectation, I’m sure you’ll one day view your quitting as one of your finest accomplishments.

Congratulations!

 



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