I Completely Failed at My Career. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing.
I am thrilled to show off today’s guest post from Rachel Allen of Bolt from the Blue Copywriting. As so many of us know, life doesn’t always follow ‘the plan’. And, fortunately, sometimes that is the best thing that can happen to us. Take it away, Rachel!
No one’s ever accused me of being unfocused.
If anything, I trend to the other extreme — and my “I will make this happen come hell or high water” attitude saw me really far in life for 22 years.
In fact, it saw me through religious prep school, where I made excellent grades, did a slew of extracurriculars, and got a perfect verbal SAT score.
Then it saw me into a private college where I was an honors student who double majored in journalism and Asian studies and minored in Mandarin.
I interned at NPR, built a portfolio of published work with everything from interviews with rock stars to exposes of government officials, wrote and defended a giant of a thesis, volunteered, and worked retail in my spare time. I was going to be a journalist, and one with a really great resume at that.
Then I graduated, and it all went up in smoke.
Despite the fact that I was more highly educated than 70% of American adults, despite my pretty portfolio, and despite the 200 polished resumes I sent out … I was unemployable. No one was hiring for anything even tangentially related to my degree.
I was the educational equivalent of all dressed up with no place to go. Cue panic.
This goal that I had been working so hard for, that I had been promised over and over and over again was waiting at the end of college was just a mirage. In fact, the only job I could get was unpacking boxes on the 6AM shift at Old Navy.
I felt like I was at a dead end. I now see it was a crossroads.
I stuck it out for 6 months, saw the people just like me getting more and more entrenched in a job that was a waste of their degrees, knowledge, and talents, and I knew I had to do something. So I packed up and moved across the world … and I still couldn’t get any work.
Then one day, I saw an ad for an online freelancing, and decided to go for it, just as a stopgap.
I agonized over that first piece — ad copy for a gift certificate for a ride in a private plane. I spent hours researching it before lovingly crafted 400 words of copy, being sure to insert the required SEO catchphrases so smoothly that the reader would never notice.
It was beautiful.
I got paid $3.25 for it.
I was ecstatic.
I became completely hooked on the idea of working for myself. I started taking on job after job, learning on the go and realizing that actually, I liked this. And customers started to fall in love with me, and come to me exclusively, and recommend me to their friends. And I started charging more, doing more, and enjoying it more.
And then one day, I suddenly realized … this wasn’t a stopgap any more. This was going to be my career.
It totally freaked me out.
At the time, I was living what looked like the online entrepreneur dream. I was living on a beautiful island in Greece, working from my laptop on a rose covered balcony in the mornings and sunbathing in the afternoons. I was having strapping young men bring me freshly pressed orange juice in oceanside cafes. And I was really unhappy a lot of the time.
Because this wasn’t the plan. The plan was to be a journalist, to make that degree pay off, to get a “real job”. There were no rules for this new career, no one to tell me if I was doing it right or wrong. And if that was the case, then that meant that the only one who could decide whether this was right for me … was me.
It took me a year of wrestling with this before I could finally work through whether this was really the right thing for me, and whether I had the moxie to step up and really go for it, instead of constantly having one eye on something else.
And, though this is incredibly oversimplified, as all narratives are, once I finally did, things largely fell into place. Now, I work from a home office, charge more for a day than I used to make in a week, and travel pretty much whenever and wherever I want. And most importantly, I actually love what I’m doing, and wouldn’t want to do anything else. What I’m doing now is a much better fit for me than journalism ever would have been.
Here’s the thing.
This is not the part where I give you a nice tweetable about grit. It’s not the part where I tell you that if you just hustle, you too can create the business of your dreams. And it’s definitely not the part where I tell you that when one door closes, another opens.
This is the part where I tell you that honestly, it doesn’t matter what you do. There’s no particular virtue in working for yourself, any more than there is any particular virtue in working for a company. The details of your goals don’t really matter — but whether or not they’re the right ones for you really, really does.
It’s incredibly easy to follow a system because “that’s what you’re supposed to do” or “that’s the plan”, only to end up working very hard to reach one goal, when actually, there’s another one that’s a much better fit.
So just think about it. Whatever you’re working so hard on right now, just ask yourself if it’s really, truly what you want. Because if it’s not, you can do all the hard work in the world … only to end up missing out on what you’re meant for.
Rachel Allen is the founder of Bolt from the Blue Copywriting, where she helps small and brave business owners like you shake up the world one industry at a time with devastatingly incisive copy and content that gets right to the heart of who you are and makes your readers’ synapses sparkle.
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