Image credits:
Kathleen Marcotte
There was once when I was alive, but barely living.
Relax. This is not going to be a horror story.
It’s more than that.
It’s about how I, and perhaps you, may be living in the in-between. Between life and death, not dead, but not really alive either.
Let me take you back to the day I passed myPerformance Improvement Plan. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s a get better or get sacked plan. I was hauled up for unsatisfactory work performance and told in no uncertain terms,
If you don’t do better, you’re out.
You follow a strict guideline. I did.
And promptly stopped caring.
For 6 months, I would step into work, open the laptop, do the work, but not care about the work. You know those days.Where you’re just putting in the shift. Clocking in, but checking out.
Where you’re almost like a Zombie, dragging your feet in, but gladly hopping out when the clock strikes 6, almost as if you smell fresh blood.
But for all the difficulties I was in, I was still comfortable. I still drew my $3690, monthly, regardless of the effort I put in.
On 17 Aug 2021, when I had that Zoom call with my bosses, telling me I had passed, there was no cry of jubilation. It was a mere,
Meh.
So what if I passed? It didn’t mean anything anymore to me.
My contract was ending on 6 October 2021.Despite having initial conversations about whether I wanted to renew it, I didn’t continue them.
Part of me just didn’t care anymore.
New York Times called it the YOLO economy, where young Gen Ys, bent over their MacBook Pros all day, were quitting for their passion jobs.
I call it the yoyo economy, where the ups and downs of COVID made me so accustomed to crazy things, that I would sign up to be yo-yoed, up and down, left and right.
Quitting without a job, just happened. It was the hardest thing I ever did, but it made me rediscover fear.
Let’s think. When was the last time you felt fear? The hair-raising fear that made you jump out of your skin? I’m not referring to the horror movie.
But the real life experience that left you in a place where you thought,
I could die from this.
Find fear, and you find life.
Sound ridiculous? Yet we spend so much of our lives searching for scary experiences that make us yell, without living out those experiences. We watch movies of that entrepreneur who gave everything to get his company started.
We hear platitudes like ‘live outside your comfort zone.’ That’s nonsense. We are living outside our comfort zones everyday. Work isn’t easy. There are problems everyday.
But what we haven’t tapped, is the deep reservoir of fear, that brings us to great things.
Think of the last time you hustled hard for something. What was it driven by? You may remember the time in university when you had to hit the deadline. Or perhaps your boss threatened to sack you, unless you hit your numbers. Or your partner said she’d leave you, unless you changed.
Fear drives us to greater.
Quitting without a job and not knowing where the next dollar would come from, made me fearful that I would have to spend the rest of my days eating from tuna cans.
Think about who you’re scared of. It’s not the person who’s stronger than you.
You’re scared of the person, who’s more scared than you. That colleague at work, who’s afraid of you getting her promotion, is going to spend more time hustling.
Fear puts the fight in you.
Halloween is traditionally trick or treat and fancy ghost costumes, deigned to frighten you.
But this Halloween, maybe it’s worth celebrating something else. The fear in you, that makes you fight for what you want.
This isn’t meant to be an inspirational story that boasts about the guts I had to quit a job. Tons of people do that.
No, it’s actually a deeper story about how my fear of losing, once kept me from the fulfilling life I once dreamt of. But somehow, growing up, people told me to be realistic, that my dreams were just a passion project, and that I needed to be dutiful.
But deep within your greatest desire lies fear - not of whether you can achieve it, but what would happen if you fought for it, with all your life.
John is a speaker who’s excited about building better workplaces for Gen Zs, and writes at liveyoungandwell.com
