How To Get Fired In Eight Months

And Come Out Doing What You Love

I was five years into a job that I hated.

It was supposed to be what I was called to do. It was suppose to be a great fit. It wasn’t. It was a dead end.

I was miserable.

Weekly, I would moan to my small group, begging for the kind of prayer that would lead me out of the job. I wanted to feel like I was doing something worthwhile, but it seemed hopeless. Though I had other job offers, they all seemed the same: more jobs where mediocrity reigned and no one really cared about what they were creating.

Their work wasn’t their art. Mine was. I didn’t fit in.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have a plan, because I did. More than a year prior my (future) business partner and I had made a pact at a table in McDonalds to found a business together. We started that evening. We took Seth Godin’s advice, and we started shipping our first product: Scriply. We worked on it at night between the hours of 10pm and 3am.

We didn’t get much sleep, and I don’t do well on a small amount of sleep. I get grumpy. Grumpy is not what you want to be when you hate your job.

In addition to Scriply, we made plans to start a client-based business to provide web design and development services. We had a name, a business plan, a bank account, and a commitment to doing things a better way. We were ready, and we didn’t even know it.

I believe that we were are all created to do a certain something. At my day job, I knew that I wasn’t doing that something. I also had no idea what that something should be. But I needed to start somewhere, and, that’s what this blog post about getting fired is all about.

I was planning my exit by preparing my start. I didn’t really know what I was doing or why, but I knew that by doing something else, and by starting, I would eventually find my way.

Months ahead of schedule became right on time. I was fired, for no inexplicable reason, and set free.

I called me wife. We were slightly terrified, but mostly thrilled. We agreed immediately that the next step for me was not to find another job. I was done with those. Besides, I had already started something new. Something I actually believed in.

So here’s the thing. It was the right thing to do — firing me. I was unhappy. The work was not challenging. I was grumpy. I was poised for an exit, and I was ready. I had started something else. It was time to move on. I do give my previous employers some credit for recognizing that.

Before I started shipping, before I understood what it meant to be a linchpin, I had no hope. It was easy to go to my crappy job and play the game. I didn’t have to give my best, because it wasn’t required. In fact, mediocrity was preferred. The people who spoke up were frowned upon. I was supposed to fit in, be quiet, and get the work done. I wasn’t supposed to try and get better, do better.

The funny thing about starting something else is that it frees you from the present prison. I suddenly became the guy with nothing to lose.

I realized that I could make a menial salary anywhere, because I was worth at least that much. I didn’t need this job. Job security wasn’t built into the place where I worked. It was built into me, and the things that I could offer the market.

With my side project, I was sharpening my skills. With my day job, I was actually diluting them.

Every day that started working on my future, I gained more confidence in the present.

Almost eight months before I got fired, I decided to stop playing the game. I became the guy with nothing to lose. I was free. I started to push back. I decided to be the one who spoke up. I decided to be the linchpin in a factory that didn’t want any.

A crappy job with a crappier salary? I can find one of those anywhere.

I spoke up, and I got fired in eight months.

Garrett Moon is a linchpin, and it once got him fired in eight months. Now, he is a co-founder at Todaymade, a company committed to doing it better. He also co-founded CoSchedule, an editorial calendar for WordPress. Garrett recommends that everyone read Linchpin.