Best Mistake I Ever Made

While it feels like a million years ago, there was a time in my life in which I was desperate for a job. Any job. Anything that would make me feel as if I had some sort of value other than sitting in the spare bedroom of my townhouse looking for work.�¯�¿�½

A year previous, I had been the editor of an internationally-circulated computer magazine. It had been a good job, but one that required almost all of my time. My wife and I wanted to start a family. It’s nearly impossible to do the fun part of starting a family when one of the partners is in the office 80 hours every week. It’s even harder to do the other part of parenting when one of the parents has to be a married single parent.

So I quit. I had another job lined up. This was in the early days of the Internet, when everyone and his cousin thought that the Internet was a money tree waiting to be plucked. I joined an editorial crew that provided web content. We were good. We were experienced. We knew our industry, and we knew our material. We were also incredibly expensive, and back then, no one had really figured out how to cash in on the Internet. After 10 months, we were all laid off.

So there I sat, hoping for a job. I was getting to the point where stocking shelves was starting to look like a valid career move, when a job fell out of the sky and landed on my desk. I’d be editing an Internet magazine. I’d be writing again. I took it without thinking about it. Suddenly, once again, I was not just employed and earning money, but my very existence had been validated. I had value.

It was, bar none, the worst job I’ve ever had.

If I had been smart, I’d have taken a day to think about the job and realized that no matter how much I wanted to work, I could do better for myself. There were other opportunities out there. But I didn’t. I subjected myself to a 90-minute commute each way in heavy traffic. I signed on to work for a boss with anger and control issues. My staff was limited to myself. I was responsible not only for the magazine’s entire content, but also the page layout, design, proofreading, editing, and production. I was almost relieved when I was told that I didn’t have to actually physically print the thing myself. In truth, most of the job was spent hunting for Internet sites that dealt with specific topics. A poorly-trained monkey could have done it, and wouldn’t have objected to the hours.

I tried to make the best of it. Every day, I’d work on content, trying to crank out as many pages as I could, falling a few more behind no matter what. It was worse than being unemployed because all of the hope of finding something better was sucked out of me. Once again, every spare moment was spent at work. I couldn’t take the time to look for a new job no matter how much I felt the one I had was crushing me. Every day, my boss would hound me. It became clear that things weren’t going to work out when I discovered that my publisher was taking mail off my desk and reading it.

I quit. He fired me. I quit again. He fired me again. This lasted for half an hour and ended with me packing my things and driving home in a combination of rage and euphoria.

Four days later, I landed a job as a data processor. Not really the work I was cut out to do, but it paid well, and I could choose my own hours. Three days after I got that job, I landed a contract with a book publisher, who kept me busy for the next seven years until kids and a desire to teach caused me to change careers again.

So what made this such a great mistake? I learned a lot from it. The experience of both quitting and being fired from that job taught me that, as both a writer and an employee, I don’t have to take what’s given to me. There are other people out there who will treat me with the respect that I deserve, and that all I really need to do is dig a little harder. It taught me that, no matter what the pundits say, opportunity knocks all the time, and it does because so many of the opportunities out there are ones that should be passed on.

Most of all, taking that lousy, thankless job was the best mistake I ever made because it made me reassess everything I thought I wanted and everything I had. No matter how much I believed that having a job validated me, it didn’t. I wasn’t a better person because I got a paycheck. I was a crankier, angrier person who snapped at people who didn’t deserve it because I thought that without the job, I wasn’t worth anything. It took an angry, overbearing boss and a painful three months to make me realize that my value as a person and as a writer is the value I give myself. Without that, every job is slave labor and every paycheck isn’t worth the effort.