Shake-up month

Getting back home Friday morning at around 10:30 a.m. felt like a nice relief. My head was exploding with migraine, hunger dominated my stomach even though I have had breakfast twice, and my hearing needed a break from the loud wall-street environment I experimented in the last 3 hours. I had just signed my resignation to my sweet corporate job full of benefits where I once had my dreams for a long career to become CEO in the telecom industry.

Even though I felt it was the right thing do, and I already had another job on the line, I was shaking with fear and anxiety, thinking about all the friends and colleagues, contacts, power for decision and the expenditure possibilities I had just left behind.  What I am going to do now? This is what I know… this is my comfort zone… these are the people I know… will I be able to change? or so I was thinking. I cannot allow myself to think this.

The shake-up month I refer to doesn’t begin from the day I resigned, but instead it started 2 weeks before, when was faced with a decision to make a change. I think this is the hardest part, because after you have decided, the ball starts rolling and all your actions will come forward to your goal. It is the point of no return, the point where you burn your boats to never look back or revert back to safe port. I decided I was leaving, for several reasons, among the most important one was that I wasn't learning business skills.

I took the decision to quit my job after several months of meditation about what I really wanted for my life. I felt there were things out there more dynamic, that would allow me to have more fun implementing and innovating, making an impact and leave my mark. Every time I talked to my brother who is an experienced innovator yet to have a big break, I would hang the phone call up depressed at how stale and predictable my life had just become, at how other people are chasing their dreams and having fun at it, while I was chasing an old dream that wan't fun anymore and I was experiencing corporate culture that I wasn't agreeing with how it was being carried.

At the same time I was getting buried deeper and deeper into the company. At some point I was only doing presentations, modifying them 300 times, then after finally presenting it, modify again for extra analysis, get a buy-in, then revert back to the previous analysis which was actually enough... all this in an endless and useless cycle for a couple of months. After a conversation with my father who retired from the same company 30 years after he did his internship, I realized this is how corporate would go for the next 30 years as he described me the top layers I would experience in the corporate world in the future. As you climb higher its just more of this political chess and strategy to get buy-ins, from the eternal-existing higher level that never ends.

It is at this point that I had a realization of change, and took charge of it. After a couple of days of phone calls I managed to engage into conversations that led to a interesting job offer. This got to mean something. Nevertheless, I still was holding on to my current state. I looked in the mirror, I talked to my wife day-in and day-out,  then Monday morning an email came in offering volunteer retirement. This cannot be true, the time has come, 2 mighty planets have aligned: a new job and a retirement option for the old job. Processing... I'm gone. Some retention here, some more waiting there, a lot of paperwork and the next Monday I was kissing my wife goodbye for work while I stayed at home.

It never crossed my mind the regret question "what have I done?". Because I knew what I was doing. Actually, I didn't know what I was doing, but I knew where I was going which is more important, and where I wanted to arrive. So I would never forget about it and commit the unforgivable sin of looking back, I wrote on a pice of paper that I keep visible everyday : "Long term objective: be independent, build your own company. Step 1: quit (check) . Step 2: Learn . Step 3. Work with external people. " . If all else fails, revert back to Sun Tzu's Art of War quite: burn your boats so you don't think about going back. Thats what I did.

So what do you do on a Monday morning after you've kissed your wife goodbye and you have nowhere to go (besides waiting for your new job to start in a couple of weeks.? Read Step 2 of my yellow post-it: Learn. I read a great book, Exponential Organizations in 6 days. Still not my all time record held by Dave's Mustaine's "A Heavy Metal Memoir" which I read in a weekend. Also, got ahold of a bunch of online courses, articles and research about my upcoming challenges and industry. Took a bunch of notes, wrote down a lot of ideas. My mind was as open as it hasn't been in a couple of years. This was critical for switching your brain to a new upcoming challenge. I felt I wasn't advancing on knowledge, but instead catching up to a world that moved on faster than I could learn of.

When you come to realize, a couple of weeks after have passed in my learning and switching state, making it a month and a half has since my turn to swing the bat came. You have all your life in your car, all your dreams on the road upfront, leaving a great city and great past in the mirror which has formed your ADN with passion, which is all what you take from companies. Your life will not be forever the same. This is a risk from a change, I don't know what will happen, all I know is I took action...  but staying put and quiet is also a risk, so I call it even and move on.

This was the "me" from one year ago, during November 2016.