A few days ago I informed my company that I intend to take a one year sabbatical and will, during that time, decide if I want to come back, cut back or simply end my career. The interesting thing is that my situation was great....I'd been working a high end sales job, from home, where annual pay averaged $200k - $300k, BUT the workload only amounted to around 5 hours a week of real work. Additionally, I am generally well-respected at my firm and no one bothered me to take on more assignments; they all sort of understood that I do what I want and I've been in wind-down mode for a while. Obviously that's a pretty good gig if you can get it, so I started wondering what inspired me to make the move. I started thinking about the mechanics of what fills up the b.s. bucket.
In my case....
1. Because of my choice to have a rather lax work week, others at the firm (who are very skilled, but hungrier) were getting better results. Even though I'm totally fine with my results objectively, when they're put into the lens of "how are you doing vs. others" it made me feel bad.
2. We became more professional. When I joined this firm 10 years ago, it was a small, relatively unknown firm in our industry. But over 10 years, we've become the go-to name for what we do. This has led us to have more corporate meetings (about once a month via video conference.) And during these, I always felt bad, again for my "relatively" poor results vs. others. The irony is that NO ONE did anything to try to make me feel bad; they all know my situation. But it's challenging to sit there, know I could do better, but choose not to. It became a struggle with myself asking, "How come I'm not more motivated?"
3. I think this is the important one: Even though the actual workload was only a few hours a week, the mental workload was much higher. I found it hard to let my deals out of my mind at night. I felt a need to almost always take a call from a client, or return a missed call within 30 minutes. And those few, important calls that I had to be on to save a deal seemed to always occur when I was on vacation.
4. When I started 10 years ago, we were just coming out of the Great Financial Crisis. I was hungry because my stocks and home values had dropped in half, and my business had recently gone under. Nowadays, it's pretty smooth sailing financially, so the criteria to go out and hustle for each additional dollar got higher, and my tolerance for anything other than "perfect" clients got lower.
So the interesting insight I had was that the "b.s. bucket" was entirely of my own-making....everything is clearly in my own head. No one put pressure on me, tried to make me feel bad, or anything like that. But at least in my head, the pressure probably felt as real as for someone who has legitimate reasons to gripe, for instance someone who works a hard physical job, someone with an unappreciative boss, etc. (And yes, I get how lucky my situation has been and I'm very grateful for that.)
Anyway, I'm curious how others view the "b.s. bucket." For me, it was interesting to realize that I had constructed it myself.
In my case....
1. Because of my choice to have a rather lax work week, others at the firm (who are very skilled, but hungrier) were getting better results. Even though I'm totally fine with my results objectively, when they're put into the lens of "how are you doing vs. others" it made me feel bad.
2. We became more professional. When I joined this firm 10 years ago, it was a small, relatively unknown firm in our industry. But over 10 years, we've become the go-to name for what we do. This has led us to have more corporate meetings (about once a month via video conference.) And during these, I always felt bad, again for my "relatively" poor results vs. others. The irony is that NO ONE did anything to try to make me feel bad; they all know my situation. But it's challenging to sit there, know I could do better, but choose not to. It became a struggle with myself asking, "How come I'm not more motivated?"
3. I think this is the important one: Even though the actual workload was only a few hours a week, the mental workload was much higher. I found it hard to let my deals out of my mind at night. I felt a need to almost always take a call from a client, or return a missed call within 30 minutes. And those few, important calls that I had to be on to save a deal seemed to always occur when I was on vacation.
4. When I started 10 years ago, we were just coming out of the Great Financial Crisis. I was hungry because my stocks and home values had dropped in half, and my business had recently gone under. Nowadays, it's pretty smooth sailing financially, so the criteria to go out and hustle for each additional dollar got higher, and my tolerance for anything other than "perfect" clients got lower.
So the interesting insight I had was that the "b.s. bucket" was entirely of my own-making....everything is clearly in my own head. No one put pressure on me, tried to make me feel bad, or anything like that. But at least in my head, the pressure probably felt as real as for someone who has legitimate reasons to gripe, for instance someone who works a hard physical job, someone with an unappreciative boss, etc. (And yes, I get how lucky my situation has been and I'm very grateful for that.)
Anyway, I'm curious how others view the "b.s. bucket." For me, it was interesting to realize that I had constructed it myself.
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