Before I worked in a bank I did taxes.
I had just been through my first tax season with very demanding clients and an office manager from hell, my daughter was two years old and I really wanted something ... ok I'll just say it ... I wanted something
easier.
I applied to a bank for a bank teller job - I could have regular hours and unless I was counting money in my sleep I would not be taking any work home with me.
At the time the bank had a management trainee program where candidates started as bank tellers and progressed to branch managers in a couple years.
The person who interviewed me, seeing my tax background, thought I might be a good fit for this program. I just wanted to be a bank teller.
So, (
while the interviewer asked me again if I didn't want a couple days to think about it), I politely declined the management trainee program and became a bank teller.
I loved it.
I loved everything about it. I loved my co-workers. I loved my manager. I loved my customers (
mostly). I loved the hours and the holidays (
we had A LOT of them).
But maybe most of all I loved leaving that branch and never thinking about it again until I pulled into the parking lot the next morning.
I didn't want a career. I wanted a job.
Now that
job lasted about a year before I found out that I was actually more cut out for a career than a job (
I became a manager around the same time the management trainees did, but I think I had a lot more fun getting there). When I think about my 10 year banking career, that very first year holds a lot of great memories for me.
There is nothing wrong with just having a job. Sometimes it's a better place for us. It works until it doesn't.
When I started my first business, people were always giving me the advice - "make sure you are not just creating yourself a
job." The 3 letter word would come out of people's mouths all puckery and sour and ...
small.
I am not a good advice-taker. So, of course paid no attention.
So, I created a business, but what I really did was build a job for myself.
At that time my mother was very ill and had moved in with us; my uncle who was like a second father to us had just died. My daughter, a latchkey pre-teen, was running amok -
(
she denies this and to this day declares me totally nuts for thinking she ever gave us a moment's trouble - "you were lucky to raise me", she says and we were actually, but the truth is she was still running amok .. and her south node Aquarius was clashing with my south node Capricorn BIG TIME)
a business would have been a totally unsustainable thing for me to be building.
I built myself a
job.
I had mall carts during the holidays and the mother's day/father's day season and during much of the rest of the year I forgot I even had a business.
Now, another decade or so down the road, I really am building a business. But it's because my life supports it now, not because there is a one way fits all way to do this thing.
You can totally build a job. You can totally build a business.
(
and you will most likely need to do both these things at some point because the kind of jobs that other people are building are going other places or disappearing entirely - Kodak had 60,000 employees in its hay-day, Instagram has 13 - annoyingly, it took me a long time to pull up this information because all anyone writes about is how much money a company loses. not so much about how many people lose their jobs)
You can totally do what works best for you and you can totally change that thing you are doing when it isn't working anymore.
We don't need to be doing it as big or as small as anybody else is doing it. We really don't.
