Hate your Job? Maybe being a little foolish is the best advice to take
I was simply going to 'retweet' this piece from Matt Stillman on the consistently outstanding Stillman Says blog, but I want to link to it from here in hopes maybe a few more folks might take a few minutes and check it out.
Matt recently talked with a lawyer, one who expressed disenchantment with her chosen field, and the conversation and eventual advice Matt offered to the unhappy lawyer is in equal parts fascinating and fantastic.
Go check out the entire piece here, but if you can't spare the five or ten minutes it will take you to read the story, I will share the money line here:
Having the itchy feeling of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs is standard. But to truly have an open door to following your bliss there is a requisite level of fearlessness that must be taken on. The fearlessness to disappoint or to be foolish are two of many that can be featured.
If you read the piece you will see that Matt doesn't advise the lawyer to simply quit her good and probably high-paying job to crazily chase some wild dream, but rather to simply think about the situation in a slightly new and creative way, and that by taking a small, non-dangerous, but still positive step in the exploration of something new and exciting, the lawyer could start to see what might actually be possible.
I think that is super advice, we tend to not want to believe something could be real or even possible when it seems so big, or represents such a massive shift or change in what we think of as safe or normal that we can simply get intimidated or frightened into inactivity. Permitting ourselves to make the first step in a new direction is possibly the hardest part. Matt offered the lawyer a way to make the scary step seem very safe.
Nice one Mr. Stillman.
Postscript - Matt was a recent guest on the HR Happy Hour Show, and it was absolutely one of our most interesting shows of 2011. You can listen to the replay of that show here.
Reader Comments (1)
Good advice. The possibility of complete failure is another fear that holds us back.