What Getting Fired Taught me About Work
Just after my 30th birthday, I got fired from my job. I still remember the room spinning when I got the news. It wasn’t something I ever expected to happen, and yet it was an enormous gift. Here’s what I learned:
The company is not your parents. I guess I was naive, but it never occurred to me that the company wouldn’t go out of its way to support me. From the experience, I learned to take a more mature, consultant-style approach to future jobs. Make sure you bring value and you know what it is, so you can negotiate what you need.- You will come back from failure. Every day I see clients terrified of failure, and the fear really holds them back. Learning that important lesson has helped me continue to take risks, and that is where the big successes come.
- Listen to your voice. The job I got fired from had lasted two months, and I knew when I interviewed that it didn’t feel right. I was lucky to get another job quickly and spent the next couple of years learning to listen to my voice to figure out the right job for me. I then went on to have the five most productive years of my corporate career.
The company is not your parents. I guess I was naive, but it never occurred to me that the company wouldn’t go out of its way to support me. From the experience, I learned to take a more mature, consultant-style approach to future jobs. Make sure you bring value and you know what it is, so you can negotiate what you need.Getting fired and finding my way is a big part of why I do what I do. It was a blessing because it pushed me one big step towards facing a big truth — that while I’d gone to good schools and gotten jobs at impressive companies, I was making decisions based on external measures, not my own.