I’m going to share a secret I figured out recently that would’ve made things better early on in my recovery and in my life.

I was reading this on the Internet and it makes perfect sense.

So often, when we lose a job or are dissatisfied with our job, we think the only thing to do is find a new job in the same field. In the 1990s, I was laid off from one job after another: 3 jobs in a row failed to work out.

Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I’m guilty of being crackers in this regard too: it wasn’t until I had spent 7 doomed years in the gray flannel insurance field that I realized something had to go.

The chance meeting with a therapist set me on the new course of going to library school so I could get a job I’d like and would be good at.

The wind-up of this story and the takeaway is that you owe it to yourself to take the time upfront to research the kinds of jobs you’d be good at and would like to do. Do this to spare yourself the misery of going down the wrong path.

If you experience burn out or this chosen field turns out not to be worth its salt down the road: you can always have a second or third career.

I’ll talk in next Monday’s blog entry about how even challenging times in our lives can turn out to have benefits.