Twenty years seems a long time. Then again it’s less than the blink of an eye since the earth is 4.6 billion years old. Too bad we insist on making it show its age.
I have earned a buck many ways since the tragic day my parents halted the allowance gravy train: Fur trapper → Busboy → McDonald’s hamburger clerk → Carpenter’s helper → Landscape laborer → Grocery store meat cutter → Newspaper reporter, circulation manager, ad peddler → Copier salesman → Joke writer and nightclub comedian → Senior corporate training executive → Sales manager → Fortune 500 contract negotiator → Award-winning author → Corporate sales consultant → Thoroughbred race horse owner & breeder → Movie screenwriter → Motivational & Life Skills coach → Public speaker → Global sales, strategy, and executive leadership specialist → College faculty advisor → International worry expert.
Every job has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are why we show up. The minuses are why someone has to pay us to.
Having worked my way through college as a meat cutter, I grabbed my diploma and decided to parlay my business major by becoming a famous sportswriter. It was a great plan and irrational segue, poorly executed. I took a pay cut to become famous and have never forgotten that dawning realization moments after ripping open my pay envelope.
My uncle had warned me. “Teddy,” he said, “you can’t eat a byline.”
He was right, as uncles tend to be. Parents have agendas but uncles don’t. When sober, they’ll opine things pretty much exactly the way they see them.
Tired of poverty and needing cash in order to date, I decided to get a real job. I wanted to work for someone who was the best in the world at what they did and my first major career choice came down to Xerox and Johnson & Johnson. At the time I was trying to reconcile an irreconcilable difference with my former college girlfriend and wanted to stay in northeast Florida. Xerox told me I wouldn’t have to move. J & J said I would. So I went with Xerox. Six weeks later they moved me.
I never planned on corporate life for more than a year or two, just long enough to save enough dough to return to writing. Two decades later I was still there. The reason is that I kept learning. I moved five times with Xerox, from Jacksonville to Ocala to Tampa to northern Virginia back to Miami and west to Denver. Except for the first move, the rest were voluntary. I have been in Denver twelve years now and hope to remain. Colorado is home for me.
The biggest of those relocations was trading Miami and South Beach for the Rocky Mountains. We had a young daughter and did not want to raise her in south Florida, so our quality of life decision was between Denver and Seattle. Denver has 300 days of annual sunshine, four distinct seasons, and a great airport where friends would come and go. Seattle is great but gray from October through April. Plus it’s tucked up in the northwest corner of the nation. None of my friends would pass through and I knew it. So we moved to the cradle of the Rockies.
I’ve worked for myself for most of the past decade, walking away from Xerox after a solid twenty year career. I did well and earned more than I ever dreamed but money governs very little of what matters to me, although it certainly comes in handy from time to time.
There were three reasons I walked away when I did (1/1/2000): Xerox wasn’t Xerox any more, I didn’t like what I’d become, and I confronted an uneasy reality: I needed to be a real father instead of an absentee one. By far the most important reason was the last.
A series of factors had caused Xerox too much corporate whitewater. Patents expired, print shifted from high volume xerographic to “soft copies” and decentralized desktop printers, plus there was some chicanery at headquarters where a small ring of senior execs conspired to cook the books for personal gain. It did not help that a co-worker shot and killed seven others in Honolulu while I was there working, a terrible tragedy I will write about another time.
The dangling carrot for corporate grinders like me was reaching 55 years old and taking early retirement. I was nine years from both when I pondered leaving. I knew I’d never make it. A job I loved had become tiresome, no longer a smile-filled joy. I was a sullen grouch, a road warrior whose life stared back frowning wrinkles in the reflection of moonlit airplane windows. I detested midnight bus rides on rental car shuttles and knew it was time to go.
Gracie, my daughter, was ten but I didn’t know a thing about her or her friends, likes or dislikes. I didn’t know her favorite color, what subjects she liked or the name of any teacher. I figured I had a three-year window to become a real dad. Thirteen, I figured, was when that window would slam shut. So, twenty years after signing on, I faxed Xerox my adios paperwork from the executive floor business center at the San Francisco Hilton near Union Square.
It was a stark and scary feeling to walk away from corporate life to immerse inside a kid’s life. For me it was foreign territory with nowhere to hide. But it got better soon enough. My first week home Gracie had a basketball game and swished a jump shot from seventeen feet. I leaped to my feet with excitement. Witnessing that shot meant more to me than any of thousands of baskets I’d scored throughout all the years I played. Years later, in high school, she crushed a grand slam in fastpitch softball to beat a rival school. I was there for that one, too. Same electrifying happiness.
When it’s time to go, it’s time to go. Have the courage to make the call and peace of mind to never look back. Happiness stands before you.