Bored with your job? Feel the fear — and JUMP
THIS is the season of the New Year resolution — and mine is to make no New Year resolutions. They never work. Possibly for this reason, it’s also the time of year when we buy the most self-help books to guide us along the righteous path to health, wealth and happiness. Here’s another one.
Mike Lewis has a CV that will make your teeth grind and your gums bleed. A graduate of Dartmouth College in the US, he acquired a plum job on Wall Street with the venture capitalists Bain Capital, selling grandmothers for the usual Titanic salary.
But all the time, he harboured a secret ambition: to be a professional squash player.
Squash is such a minority sport in the US that he has to tell his readers, in some detail, what it entails.
Lewis, being the sort of person who gets a job at Bain Capital, spends two years preparing for his jump. He trains hard, he takes part in competitions, he saves money, he tackles every task imaginable with enthusiasm and a winning smile. By chapter three, you are beginning to hate him with a passion.
Several years later, post-squash, he does not return to Wall Street, but re-emerges as the founder and CEO of When To Jump, ‘a global community of people who have left one path to pursue a very different one’. To which end, he has interviewed literally hundreds of people who made the jump.
For some, it worked brilliantly. For others, it was an abject failure. But at least they tried. No one, he says, regrets having made the change.
In fact, if anyone regrets anything, it’s not making the change sooner.
This book, then, is an encouragement to anyone thinking of taking a huge risk in their lives who is slightly frightened of the consequences. No one could blame anyone for being frightened: these are tricky times. The safer and better the job, the more you want to keep it because you might not get another.
But, as Lewis sagely puts it, you only get one life. I went freelance 30 years ago, and everyone thought I was mad. They may have been right, but I have never regretted it.
Lewis identifies four ‘key concepts’ that apply to all successful jumps. No.1 is Listen To The Little Voice. That’s the one inside you that’s you, not the one inside you that’s your parents telling you to knuckle down to a job you hate.
No.2 is Make A Plan. No.3 is Let Yourself Be Lucky. By this, he means accepting that you don’t know what’s going to happen afterwards. You have to be able to take whatever will come.
And No.4 is Don’t Look Back. Always good advice. I have completely forgotten my past and I urge you to forget yours, too.
Lewis has interviewed 44 ‘jumpers’ who are rarely less than fascinating, even if there’s a slight sheen of smugness over the whole project. But I came to like Lewis, who has a simple and powerful message: be brave.
Everyone should have these words on their wall: you only get the one life.