That moment that changes your life may not be the one you think.
When people ask me ‘when did you decide to leave engineering for ice cream’, my first thoughts go to that time after I got laid off from the start-up I joined after working at a big company for the first decade of my career. After that soul-crushing layoff, I took more than a year and a half off to travel, write, and generally just clear my head. When I finally dipped my toes into the world of work again, it didn’t take long to realize my heart just wasn’t in the job search. While I knew I was way too young to retire and I really did need to get back to my career, my engineering calling was barely whispering to me. Or as I used to joke, ‘it wasn’t calling me, not even late at night when it was drunk and horny’. The signs were all telling me it might be a great time to try something different. After all, I wouldn’t be giving up a well-paying job and sacrificing years of corporate ladder climbing at a company far in my rear view mirror. I’d always wanted to start my own business. It was clear this might be my ‘now or never moment’. But I get ahead of myself. Let me take a step back.
I started my professional career as a neophyte manufacturing engineer at a small company called AT&T. You may have heard of it. This behemoth was only slightly less so at that time, having just been forced to ‘divest’ itself into a number of somewhat smaller entities. The factory I worked at was more than a million square feet, which included office buildings cocooning a sea of cubicles for a thousand engineers and white collar types who did everything but the actual job of assembling and testing telecommunications things. I was a process engineer, a position that came with responsibilities such as designing manufacturing processes, fighting production fires, and chasing efficiency improvements. For those first years, I really enjoyed it. It was challenging and interesting, and I learned a ton. Office politics aside, the people were great, and the benefits were old school, in a good way. Think free graduate school tuition, generous annual raises, and great benefits. Best of all, it was relatively low stress and the hours were great. When I left at 4:30pm, I rarely gave the job a passing thought until I returned to my desk next morning at 7:15 am.
I won’t bore you with the minutia of the day-to-day tasks I performed, those production meetings, or the figurative fires I fought over that first decade in my first ‘real job’ as a responsible adult. Suffice to say, it was a pretty good gig. I wanted for little. I even got just the right amount of business travel, with all the perks and pitfalls that come with that sort of thing. Despite what may sound like the dream job for an engineer, eventually I started to feel restless.
So how did a bout of restlessness turn me into an ice cream man? And what’s this about a startup?
More importantly, if being unemployed and unattracted to my chosen vocation wasn’t the pivot point, what was it?
Turns out, it was an otherwise uneventful Tuesday.
Let me set the scene. I was sitting at a long table in a dark windowless conference room. The stale air in the room wreaked of burnt coffee and day old donuts. Sitting around the table at this meeting were a number of apathetic production and clerical folks. Across from me was Richard, an older gentleman (I was all of 29, so this described nearly everyone). He was a senior engineer. This was the top of the engineering food chain, a well earned position generally out of reach before a decade of dedicated service to the company. While he always seemed to enjoy his job, Richard didn’t bring much enthusiasm to the room. He was essentially doing the same job as I was, twenty years later in his career, with only the small distinction of the word ‘senior’ on his business card and a modestly larger paycheck.
I didn’t know much about him then - his work/life balance, his family situation, hobbies, passions. I just got this overwhelming feeling of dread as I looked across the table at him. In that moment, I decided he wasn’t who I wanted to be in a couple of decades. He was my ghost of Christmas yet to come, and like Ebenezer, I didn’t like what I saw. I began to second-guess my career choice. Would I be wasting my life by choosing his path? Shouldn’t I be more grateful for the great job I had with its generous compensation, benefits, and enviable work/life balance? Was I just being an entitled brat?
I let those thoughts wash over me like a rogue wave laden with seaweed. By the end of that meeting, my mind was made up. I needed to see what else might be out there for me.
The very next morning I put my resume on Monster.com and within a few weeks got an interview with an exciting and hopeful startup in the burgeoning telecom field. I quickly responded, got an interview, and a week later had an offer I couldn’t refuse.
That startup experience was everything my first job wasn’t - difficult, stressful, demanding, heartbreaking, and ultimately a failure. While the company disbanded not long after my layoff, I couldn’t help but feel I just wasn’t ready for that level of responsibility.
But I also remember feeling no regrets, even as I sat on that beach right after my layoff experience - unemployed, shell shocked, ego bruised but not broken, just trying to wrap my head around what had just happened. Instead of letting those negative feelings consume me, I distinctly remember thinking (I may have actually said it aloud to the circling seagulls), ‘I'm going to make this the best thing that ever happened to me.’
Looking back, now more than two decades into the Jim 2.0 project, I can say without hesitation that it really was the best thing. I chose not to be that guy and instead became the guy I was meant to be.
Has your Ghost of Christmas yet to come been trying to get your attention lately?
