Bad career advice

Twice in my life I have quit jobs without having another job waiting. Three times, to be honest, but the first time involved a college job as a part-time clerk at a shitty Texas convenience store that I mostly quit to deny a jackass middle manager the ability to claim he fired me. But that’s a story for another day. As is the story about how I had to take a polygraph test as a condition to being hired for the part-time shitty Texas convenience store job and how I learned that you could lie on a polygraph test and not get caught.


I digress. This is a story about bad career advice. In my case, bad advice that was well intended, but completely wrong. I received this bad advice not once but twice, which coincides with the number of times I have quit career-path type jobs without another job waiting.  Both times I had to make that awkward walk to an editor or publisher’s office to give notice of my intent to leave my journalism job at their daily newspapers. And awkwardly reveal that I wasn’t quitting because The New York Times had called. Not even the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin or Laramie Boomerang (Laramie's Voice Since 1881!). Nope. Just quitting. This seemed remarkably stupid to my bosses, who both delivered remarkably similar lectures premised on the proposition that only an idiot would willingly leave a job without having another job waiting from him.

The worst career advice this idiot has ever received.

To be fair, the advice seems prudent and reasonable. If one of my kids someday comes to me with a plan to quit a job without having another job, my Skeptical Dad Eyebrows™ certainly would rise. In my case, though, I had a plan. My bosses utterly failed to appreciate my plan in the way that I did. And they failed to appreciate that I wasn’t looking for career advice.

I was 26 years old when I first quit a job without another job waiting. I was working for a small daily newspaper in Nebraska, missing mountains and sagebrush plateaus of my home turf out west. Plus I had an opportunity to paddle a canoe down a couple of hundred miles of the Yukon River in Yukon Territory, Canada. But I didn’t have much vacation time. So my plan was to quit my job, spend a couple of weeks up in Canada, and then stay with my parents while I looked for a new newspaper job. Upon hearing my plan, my wise and distinguished editor looked at me as if I’d just explained to him that I planned to kidnap the Pope for ransom and then retire to Bolivia and live off the subsequent riches.

But it turned out great for me. It took a few weeks of living in my parents’ basement, but I eventually ended up working at another small daily newspaper in southern Idaho with close proximity to mountains and desert and plenty of public lands for recreating. I eventually became editor of a weekly magazine put out by the paper. In the five years since quitting my job in Nebraska, I had the job I’d always wanted in a place I wanted to live. Or at least the job I thought I wanted.

By now I was married and my wife worked at a junior college. We weren’t getting rich, but we had no kids, no mortgage, and little debt. Then one day my wife was offered a job at the University of Wyoming. One of the perks was that the university would pay her tuition to pursue a graduate degree plus half tuition for a spouse. Wyoming sounded like an adventure. I decided that what I really wanted to do was go to graduate school and become a history professor.  Upon hearing my plan, my  wise and distinguished publisher bluntly told me that I was making a terrible mistake. At one point in the discussion, he complained that “half the fucking people traveling around the country in the summer are college professors.” That is not how talking me out of quitting my job to become a professor works, sir.

Anyway, I went to Wyoming but ended up in law school after graduate school so I don’t spend summer semester breaks clogging up National Parks and Interstate highways. But the outcome once again worked out more or less as intended.  Not that I’m saying “I told you so,” that’s for others to decide. I have, however, learned a few lessons about giving advice. Especially unsolicited advice giving. Extra-especially unsolicited career advice giving. First, don’t be condescending and assume the person on the receiving end of the advice hasn’t thought through his or her plan, even if it’s as stupid as quitting a job without having another job. Second, don’t mistake your values and interests for the values and interest of the person on the receiving end of the advice. For instance, if you’re old, hop in the way-back machine and remember the freedom of being young and poor. No kids, no mortgage, no job, no problem!*

The trip to the Yukon, by the way, was an experience of a lifetime and led to similar adventures over the years with my step-father, Larry, who was the instigator of that trip. Larry, by the way, also provided me the best career advice I've ever received. When I called home about the Texas convenience store situation, and whether I should quit, wait to be fired, or fight what I considered unfair treatment, he reminded me that I had gone to Texas to attend college, not work at a convenience store. I quit the next day. Another experience that I wouldn't trade was the opportunity to return to graduate and law school after spending 10 years working for a living. Graduate school was reading books I'd always wanted to read, talking about books I'd always wanted to read with smart people, and then researching and writing about things I cared about. Law school provided me a framework for critical thinking, an opportunity to forge lasting friendships, and the pathway to a second career that allowed me to use many of the hard-learned skills and tools developed during my first career.

So my career advice to anyone who asks is always this: Put your affairs in order, give your two-week notice, pack the 4WD and head to the Yukon Territory.  Alternatively, go to law school. Kidding, of course. My real advice is to stay young and poor and out of debt. Then you can afford to ignore career advice that conflicts with your plans.

*Nothing herein is intended to nor shall apply to any advice that the author may someday give to his children nor in anyway be used against him by said children known and unknown.