My stress level is beyond healthy and I no longer want responsibility.
~Worker Living in GEORGIA
Sometimes we’ve had enough responsibility.
We’ve had enough meetings.
We’ve had enough company problems.
We know what we want…no more responsibility for this or for that.
We want some downtime.
We want to just be responsible for ourselves and our family stuff.
P.S.
What do you want?
I’ll never ever forget an object lesson that my father taught me.
It was 1991 and I had just graduated with my undergraduate degree. I had decided not to relocate with Hoechst Celeanse and to finish the last 40 hours I needed for the degree. They had offered me a relo and most everyone was taking the package. I went looking for all of my options and one of them was to go back to school full-time for a year and finish a degree that was taking forever going part-time. It was a smart decision, but I graduated during a horrible recession and there weren’t many jobs. I was a single parent with a 6-year-old son. Yes, I had a degree now, BUT I didn’t have a job. It was a difficult difficult time.
I was broke when I walked across that stage…dead broke.
My first mentor ( I’ve had many throughout my career) had invited me to D.C. She was well-off, owned her own business and her graduation gift to me was an airline all-expense paid trip to D.C. When I left town I felt hopeless. When I got back from D.C. I was on fire. I had seen the possibilities. The world was my oyster. I had confidence. I had a great attitude about life…even though I was still without a job and broke.
My father had watched me struggle looking for a job, he’d even tried to “network” for me with the folks who came into his barbershop. When he saw me after I arrived back from D.C. he noticed the difference in my attitude. He asked me if I had gotten a job and I told him: “no, I got a better attitude”. He told me that was all I needed and to come with him.
He had a 7-11 coffee cup in his hand.
He sat the cup on the table and told me to look at the cup. I did. (My father was the kind of man that you did what he told you to do :-).
Then he said he wanted me to stare at the cup. Look at it really good. I did. THEN he said; “Now I want you to find the cup in the wall.” I was confused. He explained the instructions again, I was to look at the cup, then look up at the blank white wall and try to see the cup.
I looked at the cup, then looked at the wall and saw nothing. I did it about 5 more times and there was nothing there but a wall.
Around the 6th time I did it I could see the outline of the cup in the wall. I told my father that I thought I knew what he was talking about because I could see the cup. He said: “NO, you don’t have it yet, do it again.”
I did it again, and again, and again.
SUDDENLY I looked up at the wall and the cup was EMBEDDED in the wall. It wasn’t an outline, it wasn’t an image, it was THE CUP. I jumped up and said:” I SEE IT DADDY, I SEE IT.”
Then he said: “Okay now you’ve got it. WHATEVER YOU WANT IN LIFE IS ALREADY THERE BUT YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IN ORDER TO FIND IT.”
Now, What do YOU want? Not what you don’t want…what DO you WANT? You have to see on the inside before you can find it on the outside.
You are reading from the book Just Quit & Live
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