How To “Quit” Your Job (And Stay Employed and Engaged)
This reflection was written in October 2016 and marks the time I decided to stop coasting through my existence, stop complaining that living a life of passion and purpose was an impossible quest, and start taking accountability for the mark I will (or won’t!) leave on the world.
Last week was China’s national holiday and I had the pleasure of spending the time in Portland and also getting acquainted with the small town (which still managed to support four breweries) of Oregon City. Since I’m not the kind who can easily relax, to me the mark of a good vacation is being able to turn off my mind to the hamster wheel of thoughts that are always annoyingly rolling around in my head and just have fun. And fun I did!! Time idling through Powell’s Bookstore, planning the day by the breweries we wanted to visit (no beer before noon, except on the last day when the rule was broken to celebrate my brother, Billy’s, birthday), eating oh so much of our favorite foods, and just soaking in being home. I must have visited Whole Foods or Fred Myers at least every day, and the empty suitcase that accompanied me west was anything but on the journey east. Life is damn fine sometimes.
Monday I went back to work and cringed when someone broke the silence and talked to me, and we weren’t even in the building. After I was harassed by a second person armed with the offensive question about whether my vacation was restful, I came up with a brilliant idea that a quarantine period should be required on the first day back from vacation, where you work from a private room cut-off from everyone, and no one is allowed to talk to you until you have completed mental re-entry.
Today is Wednesday, the tremors of the first day are behind me, and I’m pretty much feeling back to normal (but still 100% supportive of a quarantine). Instead of spending the first 30 minutes awake browsing news headlines, I made coffee right away and opened up my book on creativity exercises. I wanted to start the day by doing something meaningful, which I almost never do. I flipped through a few pages until I landed on this:
#133, write a cause-and-effect chain
“Write a chain of twenty-five events, in the order they would occur, if you were to do something unexpected right now in this moment.”
So I made a list of 25 things that would happen if I quit my job, today.
I could feel the excitement. There are so many things I could do if I was just unshackled! This is certainly not the first time I’ve had this thought, and I know I’m not alone here.
It started out in a way that some might consider bland, but to me was perfect. I would make breakfast. And not just any breakfast, but a breakfast of scrambled eggs with baby asparagus and pecorino cheese on a fresh baguette (because apparently I had the foresight last night to make the dough in preparation for this unexpected event). I would feast, and then I would go for a walk (because walking is when I do my best thinking) and I would go through that loonnng list of activities and projects I’ve been dying to get to, and take that first step toward re-branding the me I’ve always wanted to be!
I filled the list with the things I genuinely want to do. Write about food and culture, write my China memoir, go to cooking school in Sichuan (or at least cook my way through the cookbook that’s sitting on my bookshelf). The list is great, and I hope I do get to do all of these things, but I was also surprised at how unimpressive they were to actually quit my job for.
Why would I think that? Because the ideas were fine, but I don’t have a direction (yet). If I had a plan to turn any of these into a viable business, or better yet if I had already made significant progress on any of them, I might think differently. But today, I still have to think about earning a paycheck.
So my hobbies aren’t yet significant enough to turn into my full time focus. It was a bummer, but it did make me realize that I need to be dedicating time to develop these projects so that someday, maybe even a soon someday, they will be a significant and meaningful part of my life personally and hopefully even professionally. If I don’t make the time, it’s on me. I am accountable for my success, and I am accountable for how I spend my time.
So in a way I did “quit” my job today, because I decided to create a different focus for my life, and make the development of my whole self a priority. The first thing I did today was a creativity exercise that turned into a deep self-exploration adventure. Before 7AM, I already had accomplished something, and it was for ME.
My tough love lesson is about diligence. My memoir won’t write itself, and if I expect to ever see something from it, the least I can do is stick to a schedule where instead of mindlessly browsing the Internet or watching Netflix, I’m working on something that means something to me. Because if I can’t find the time for it, how can it be meaningful? If anything is holding me back, it’s me, and it’s unfair to place the blame on work.
Tomorrow I hope I also make the same smart decision to “quit” my job.
