Always bet on yourself
“The difference between who you are and who you want to be, is what you do.”
Bill PhillipsI just made the hardest decision of my professional life.
I decided to leave a company that has given me the best years of my career. I’ll be leaving a situation that didn’t just bring me joy but allowed me to thrive, to grow, and to flourish. I’ll be leaving a place that I have already proven myself in—knowing full well some of my success was pure luck, and knowing luck doesn’t always strike twice. Knowing most of my success was simply a product of the incredibly brilliant, hardworking, and dedicated people I was around. I’ll no longer be working with people that I believe will be life-long friends. I’ll no longer be supported by what has become a tremendous host of advocates. I’ll no longer be around so many people that I care so deeply about. And frankly, I’m probably walking away from a more lucrative financial future for us in the next couple of years.
And I decided to move toward the certainty of new and potentially higher pressure, require paying dues again, which will take away from our family, and put me in a role where I don’t know if I’ll be as successful.
And the scariest part: if I were to fall short of my current position’s goals, I know things would still be great. But in my new role, if I fall short--and worse, even if I succeed, it is entirely unknown if great is even possible.
The easy and safe decision is to stay. The hard decision is to leap towards a potential of greatness. Not that the situation is more remarkable, as I have no idea. But maybe, just maybe, through great success or catastrophic failure, it teaches me the life lessons necessary to be the professional and leader that I want to become.
There is so much more to this than just the above, and I’d love to tell you all about it one day. But, to me, it all rolled into one concept: follow my true north.
Sometimes it takes a while to find a true north; it certainly did for me. But, I have a direction I want to move towards, and I believe that this new path is the best way forward for you, mom, and me. And the best part is, it’s going to be the best path forward no matter what because you can’t walk down two paths at the same time. I felt incredibly fortunate to be in a position where both paths could take me in the right direction, but the advice I’d give to you is not to be afraid to fail, to always bet on yourself and your capabilities, and know that greatness doesn’t just happen—you have to make it happen. So I’m going to live that too.