Читать книгу Embracing the Awkward - Joshua Rodriguez - Страница 11

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Don’t stop when things are good

“Passion is an unmatched fuel. Add being happy to that and you have a wonderful formula for good health.” —Gary Vaynerchuk •

By the time I graduated college, I had already been working part-time at an internship that took me on full-time once I had my bachelor’s degree in Business Marketing and Digital Arts. I felt accomplished—I had secured a job when so many of the people around me were struggling to find something to do, and I finally felt like I had made it. At first, I was excited to be working where I did, at a technology company that sold tech products to college bookstores. I was in charge of managing the website, adding products, designing campaigns, and more. And while it definitely was fun for the first year, I slowly began to realize that it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.

Those were feelings I was quick to dismiss though; there were lots of people struggling to find a job in the first place, who was I to be complaining about having a job I didn’t like? So I instead decided to shift my focus to doing things outside of my job, thinking I had to dedicate forty hours of my week to someone else just so I could live for the weekends. It was the type of reality that I figured was normal and expected once you graduate. Little did I realize I was back in the same trap as before, I was working to meet the expectations of others and not those of myself.

I had become complacent, living day to day for someone else’s goals and dreams and not my own. And the reason I never did anything about it was because I had learned how to fit my life around it; it was like a giant rock in the road that I would just drive around because I never wanted to move it. In some ways it really didn’t work for me, but in other ways it was completely comforting to know that I had security there. Year after year, I remained at that job with no plans for growth in my career or for my future. I was so sucked into the day-to-day that I never took the time to think beyond that.

I was at that job for four years before the company let me go. The reason they let me go was because they were going to outsource my job to someone else to do it for cheaper, and honestly, that was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I remember the day my boss called me and my coworker who also worked on the website into her office and told us the “bad” news. I smiled at her, thanked her for hiring me, and suddenly felt like the world was completely open to me. I had never seen the world around me like this before, I felt like if I applied myself where I needed to, I could literally accomplish anything.

I called my mom on the way back home and explained what had happened with such a sense of relief. Had I not had the rock moved for me, who knows how long I would have stayed there. This was a mistake I knew I wouldn’t allow myself to make again. If I ever felt complacent again, I would be aware of it as a tendency next time and prevent it from taking hold at all costs, because all it would end up doing would be to hold me back from being somebody great.

Embracing the Awkward

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