📘 An existential crisis is the mother of a dramatic career change

The Dad wouldn't exist without General Electric

When I worked at GE there was a conference room on the 4th floor. It had large windows overlooking the parking lot, and beyond that, a cemetery. I sat in long meetings listening to (and talking about) crap like productivity savings calculations or DPMM workflows and I stared out the window. Did the people in the cemetery have regrets at the end of their lives? Did they achieve their hopes and dreams? Did they ever have an existential itch? Did they scratch it or just keep doing the safe thing?

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My senior year of undergrad I was working as a co-op at Cinergy, an electric utility in the midwest. We were in the middle of an acquisition with Duke Energy. I traveled several times to HQ in Charlotte, and I was appointed the merger communications lead for the IT department. Graduation was approaching and I needed a real, salaried job in a big way and Duke had a hiring freeze because of the merger. My hire request went all the way up to the C-level, and they said no.

My girlfriend at the time was working as an HR intern at GE for their IT leadership program. She put in a good word, and I got an email that same day with an offer to join their co-op program.

(Fun fact: I never interviewed for a job at GE. I was hired without ever speaking to anyone in person.)

I still had one semester left of undergrad, but I needed to get in some co-op rotations at GE so I could attempt to join their IT leadership program in the fall. So I worked at GE full-time while going to school full-time. It was a GRIND.

I didn’t even fully realize it at the time, but this type of challenge and goal seeking was fulfilling to me. At the time it just felt stressful.

So that fall, I interviewed for the leadership program. I was already graduated and didn’t technically have a full-time job yet. So this was… important.

The GE leadership programs are prestigious. Most of them are four 6-month rotations throughout the business and often in different parts of the country or world. There are intense training sessions at the beginning that are literally called “bootcamp” where you spend an entire month in a hotel in Danbury Connecticut with other recent college grads from all over the world. There’s another one a year later. For me, that one was in Shanghai China.

“Bootcamp” routine: Work, visit historic sites, party, sleep (???), repeat

The people I met at bootcamp are lifelong friends. What up IMLP class of Winter 2007!

The interview to get in is actually a presentation. You put together an 8 minute presentation about what you’ve accomplished at GE as a co-op. You present to a room full of managers and executives. If you hit the 8 minute mark, they stop you, even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. After the presentation, they say nothing. You sit down, and then they take turns asking you behavioral-style interview questions like “Tell me about a time when you failed and how you handled it.”

I was hella nervous. I’m nervous a lot. (We’ll get into that.)

I went back and found my presentation! And let me tell ya, it’s a real page turner. /sarcasm.

But after all that work, all that stress, all that worrying…. I got a spot on the program. I was thrilled. I canceled my backup option (grad school), and got to work. Or, rather, continued working.

I was ecstatic. I was working with some of my best friends. I was getting a salary. I was relieved and excited and fired up. It felt like I had landed my dream job.

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How does one go from that level of joy and excitement to staring out a window at a cemetery wondering where it all went wrong?

If you’ve ever worked in a job for long enough, you already know. This kind of thing happens. It’s nothing against the job, the company, the people. Sometimes (and more so for some people) a job can end up not being the ideal fit.

But also, there were other factors at play here for me.

I love a challenge. I love setting an ambitious goal and achieving it.

In college, it was to get a solid co-op job, get good grades, finish my senior project, graduate.

Then it was to get in the GE leadership program.

Then to finish that and get a good off-program job.

Halfway through the leadership program I started my MBA, taking night classes. Also my daughter was born halfway through that.

And then, after all of that, I had no big goal, no big challenge. Just silence. Unfulfillment. Boredom? It felt like STRESS. It felt like something was wrong with me.

I remember distinctly feeling this massive sense of “WHAT’S NEXT?”

Combine the staleness of a difficult job you’ve been in for a while, with the type of person who loves going after big challenges and you get… an existential crisis.

“This can’t be all there is. I need to do something more fulfilling. I need to get out of here.”

Look, I realize this is all extremely privileged. I was in a very solid job that people would fight for. As I did! I am so grateful for it. But these were the thoughts that were the basis for the existential crisis. I needed a change in a big way.

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Maybe you’re in a similar spot with your career right now? Maybe you’re tempted to chuck it all and start something new.

Maybe you want to spontaneously quit. That’s 100% what I wanted to do.

But my wife, ever the pragmatist, ever the planner, was there with sage wisdom. We had 2 young kids. I couldn’t just quit my job, not without a plan. So we sat together in our family room, and wrote out a “5 year escape plan.”

I hear the giggles. I hear the snickers. What type of Type A person writes out a 5 year plan with their significant other? Who thinks that way?

I love plans. I love goals. Write that shit down. Manifest it into existence. (Really it just embeds it in your mind and subconsciously forces you to work harder towards it. But what’s the difference?)

I wrote my 5 year corporate escape plan in 2015.

2 years later we launched The Dad.