Y'know how when you buy a new car (or daydream about it), suddenly, everybody everywhere is toolin' around in your dreammobile? It's right up ahead of you at the toll booth; it's parked in front of your favorite restaurant; it is omnipresent and looking omni-excellent, but it's just kinda eerie that the entire automotive universe has suddenly turned into road show of This Is Your Life.
Well, I'm not quite in the new car market myself nowadays, but I do spend a pretty fair amount of time grinding my mental gears about what I'm doing/not doing/should be doing with my career -- and I discovered the conversational equivalent of the new car phenomenon at a party for a just-turned-two year old friend who lives around the block from us.
First I heard, "I was sitting in church one Sunday wondering how I was going to support my family..."
Then I heard, "I sent out thousands of resumes and didn't hear a thing in return..."
Just when I thought that everyone at the party was in the same fix, I sat next to a woman eating birthday cake who told me her interior design firm was just humming along.
"That's great," I said. "How long have you been at it?"
"Oh, about 15 years," she said.
"And has it been humming all the while?"
"Oh no," she said. "At first I was really lucky. Right out of college, I landed this huge contract to do interior design for [a national franchise we all visit at least a couple of times a year]. That was such a golden egg, for two years. And then, they reorganized, and brought the job I was doing in-house, leaving me with nada."
"Wow," I said, warming to the tale, especially because it seemed to have a happy ending. "What did you do?"
"I just started cold-calling my brains out and did whatever work I could get my hands on," she said. "It was really rocky, really gruelling for a while. But I finally figured out how to do that marketing, and now I feel like I can pretty much get business, whatever it takes."
We ate the rest of our cake, while I thought, "You see, it can be done."
Later I overheard yet another neighbor say, "Y'know, I never expected to be in sales. Theater arts, that was my major. But, they just don't prepare you in college for the way business really works. It's a lot gutsier a process than I ever, ever knew."
Now, that might seem like something a fella would say just a year or two after his last keg party. But we were all mid-thirtyish at this 2-year-old's birthday, and it sure seemed like a lot of us were hastening to grow up in a hurry on account of the adorable ones pulling each other around in the wagons up and down our friend's driveway.
Anyway, it simultaneously shook and soothed me to know that so many of my neighbors seem to be grappling with the same career confusion that's got me going nowadays. Shook because I feel for them; but soothed because I'm relieved to know that it's not just me who feels unclear and sometimes daunted by the whole process of career building. Not being sure about the best way to go, or even how to get headed in the right direction, seems less like a personal shortcoming and more like, like -- party conversation!
So, hey -- why donchya join right in? Not only about career angst (although if that's where you're at, have some cake and eat it too while we compare notes) -- but also about whatever you pick up on what folks are saying about their work experiences nowadays. What patterns are YOU tuning in on, and how do they resonate with you?
Lemme know!
Check out my previous whadduyathink-pieces in The Gozone Layer
