My Career Is Over
It’s not a scandal. It’s not an old post that showed up that got you sacked. It’s the gentle realisation that you are no longer relevant. Technology has impacted your job. Younger and faster are ‘better’ at it than you. The ceiling has been hit and there is nowhere else for you to go. It’s the realisation that somehow, you have now become the mentor instead of the go-to person to get it done. What does this mean for you and how can you benefit from this transition?
It reminds me of that saying “the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” by T.S. Elliott. It’s exactly how it felt. I was working one day and realised, this is it. I’ve lost my edge. I’ll never be ‘that’ anymore. I will only ever be ‘this’. This is my level now. I have totally lost my skills, my brain power. My drive.
I’ve lost the significance I once placed on my job as my be all and end all of my existence. I’ve strived all of my life and I’m still here with nothing. It’s all come and gone and now I’m trying to get it back with half the skills I had in my youth, hardly any opportunity in the workplace, and a spirit that struggles every day to stick to the original plan when I feel like I’m ‘playing around’ instead of earning money to pay off debt.
I’ve been totally neglecting my ebay store lately and I really don’t understand why. I had a little mini crisis with it as I was shifting from what I was selling to what I wanted to focus on selling. When I did this, my sales kind of dropped because what I’m choosing to sell is a very select field and I don’t know that there are enough collectors in Australia to really fund my ambitions for that avenue of my life.
I still have so much fabric to list – I mean 10 rubbish bags full. It’s time consuming and soul destroying but it sells – and relatively quickly too.
I found myself totally frozen. I felt like I had no identity anymore and just a huge load of debt that was crushing me and my ideas to get out of it seemed like fairytale madness. How could I spend time on these etheral things when I owe money to my children? I couldn’t that’s how. I feel guilty if I do and guilty if I don’t so I might as well just stick to the old safe and narrow and work a job.
And this is where it really hit me. I am so, so limited in my employment aspects from this time forward in my life. I wrote more about that here. I’m not going to get back to middle management. My earning capacity in a job is severely limited and even if I do everything I’ve been doing and live as frugally as possible, I’m still only left with $700.00 a month to invest. So it’s going to take a few years to pay back the $20,000 I owe my kids at this rate.
When I was doing ebay full on I did amass quite a bit of money relatively quickly and honestly I think this is my best course to get some quick cash together, but honestly – I find it a bit boring and mundane and it’s definitely not my life’s work.
Which brought me to a huge reflection. What is my life’s work? What do I want to look back on and say that yes I made a difference there? Helping patients through the healthcare system, to me, is honourable and underrated. I know I’ve helped thousands of patients and they don’t even know it or knew it but have forgotten. I’m OK with that – really. But is it enough for me? Is that really my great life’s work?
No.
My great life’s work is writing and communicating. But I’m frozen for now to take that to the level that I want to. I can’t let the fictional characters come to life onto the page while I owe money. It’s just a thing. I feel like I’m wasting time doing it when I should be out working every hour.
I know that long-term my writing will bring me passive income. But it’s a long, long haul and not an immediate fix. This is a 3 year plan I’m working here and it will ultimately pay off.
So maybe I need to take my writing fiction into that 3 year plan as well. Instead of feeling that I’m ‘wasting time’ and not earning enough money, I try to find a balance between earning enough to keep me fed and housed, and incorporate my fiction writing into my non-fiction writing 3 year plan with my websites. Mmmmm, I might have just stumbled onto something.
Still on my desk is the quote “How can you achieve your ten year plan in the next six months” which I am actively undertaking by 10 x all my efforts. Well nearly/mostly. Instead of writing a blog post a week, I’m aiming one or two a day across four blogs. My Youtube strategy is the same. Instead of one a week, I’ll be uploading at least one a day.
My ‘career’ if ever I really had one, is gone. What I do for a living has replaced it. The satisfaction that my ‘career’ gave me is also gone. I am nowhere nearly as emotionally invested in my job as I once once. Instead I’m emotionally invested in my own goals, what I want to achieve and what I want to leave my children. The form this takes is no longer as important to me as it once was. I don’t think I’ll ever get my doctorate, Nobel Prize, or senior management position. I’m OK with that now. For the first time ever. None of it is important to me.
So if your career ends with a bang one day and you find yourself without job, career, reputation and options, you have to dig deep my friends. Go way inside and work out how you really want to spend the remaining years of your life because they will go more quickly that all the ones that you have watched pass you by so far.
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