What Drives Your Individual Pursuit Of Happiness?

Skill set, compensation, mobility, fear, and passion are the five career determinants through which you can assess where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there. As you practice that diligence, I will be helping you strategize how to monetize where you want your restart to take you so that, in due course, you can detour sharply out of your current job and its dissatisfactions and into the career meant for you. You simply cannot restructure, reroute, or make the detour you want to make without peeling down to the core of the life and the career you’re in right now. It starts with honesty and vulnerability as you ask yourself what’s not working. You’ll need to be diligent with time management to simultaneously meet the expectations of your job while working on the strategy that will take you to your restart. You are a free agent. Stop giving companies the commitment they haven’t given you. Specifically, you created at least a hairline fracture in the blueprint that was handed down to you. Then I hope you got vulnerable enough to tell yourself the raw truth about your life and career. There’s just one more thing you need to do now as you get ready to take specific, practical steps toward the restart you seek. Get your priorities straight. What I’m talking about, however, is a deep exploration into what is really most important to you.

What's Gone Is Gone

Deep and maybe difficult. And let’s do this right here, right now. It’s a strategy that backs you into a corner, forces you to look within, and insists that you find answers, potentially the answers you have been avoiding your whole life. When it came to the anxiety attacks, the pill taking, the hating myself for selling out, I was on my own. So why should I enable anyone but me to decide what really, really counts in my life? I think a lot of people found themselves doing this kind of priority probing during the pandemic. Maybe because they were working from home and were therefore out of the normal work environment, and maybe because a health scare nearly always prompts the reminder that you only live once, and maybe, too, because there was plenty of time to think about the long game, not to mention a flush of financial liquidity that suggested lots of possibilities. It’s something we should all do from time to time as a matter of habit, maybe by asking for a leave of absence to clear the mind or as something to undertake in the fresh surroundings of a vacation trip or as something we just stop and command ourselves to do from time to time precisely because we only live once and doing it happy and fulfilled is a lot better than the alternative. In an interview I once did with Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran, as savvy and as entrepreneurial a businesswoman as there is, she revealed her process for undertaking any new project or enterprise. My first step is I get a yellow pad, draw a line down the middle, and on one side I put what I love and on the other side I list what I hate. That’s my starting point. Make it your restarting point. At the end of the day, what drives your individual pursuit of happiness? What is more important to you right now than anything else? Is it financial gain with its promise of security and flexibility? Maybe it’s professional advancement and the power and prestige of a place in the hierarchy and a say on executive matters.

Salt Of The Earth

Or maybe for you it’s strictly personal fulfillment through doing something you love with the right people around you in a place you want to be. Yes, the answers will change over time, even day to day. Maybe your top priority now is to pay off your student debt once and for all. The desire to be out from under that obligation is the one thing you want more than anything else. And once it’s paid, something else will take over as top of the list. And when excitement, optimism, and energy align with daily direction, the result is peak performance. Before Ken Jeong became the massive actor and comedian we know him to be, he was a licensed physician. Jeff Bezos was a computer scientist on Wall Street before he founded Amazon. Martha Stewart was a stockbroker before she became, well, Martha Stewart. Is the point I’m trying to make beginning to click? Those three, among many others, followed what counted to them. That decision fired up a kind of channeled energy whose power cannot be overstated. You can have such a restart, too, one based in and pegged to your priorities, a restart that will take you to the pinnacle of your performance and to a happy life that meets your definition of success.

Tomorrow Never Knows

The longest of the relocations took me from Rochester, New York, to Seattle, Washington. So I went where they wanted me to go when they wanted me to go there. And I scored an uptick in my financial health with each move. The most significant relocation I accepted, the one to Seattle, also swept my title up to senior level. So let me tell you why I actually took the gig three thousand miles away from my whole life to a place where I knew no one. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to get into, but I did know that I would need money to find the answer. For me, that meant becoming debt free and saving up a good supply of cash to live on while I looked for that answer. When The Bachelorette opportunity came up, I asked for a personal leave of absence from the Seattle job. The request was well thought out and strategic. When I submitted the request in the form of the deal memo, it was like a memo on fire, as I’ll explain.