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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, Pikes Peak is the highest elevation I’ve ever experienced, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously said, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” He’s right. Patience is bitter.
Navigating our career path is difficult and filled with all sorts of obstacles. I found this to be true when I was navigating my career at the store level of the company I previously worked for and it was equally true when I moved to the corporate level of the company. It’s probably no surprise that the last twelve years as an entrepreneur have brought tremendous navigation hurdles as well. In fact, this year has been one of the most difficult to navigate of them all.
Difficulties and challenges come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them, perhaps most of them, are brought about by things out of our control. Perhaps it’s our desire to control them that makes it challenging. We want things our way in our time. But is that TRULY what we want? Perhaps a better way to ask it is, is that truly what is best?
I want it my way and I want it now sounds an awfully lot like Veruca Salt, the spoiled brat from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Perhaps our motives aren’t the same as hers, but the desire for instant gratification, the avoidance of difficulty to skip the bitterness of waiting is inevitably not in our best interest.
We know this, yet when given the chance to grow through waiting or gaining our desired outcome quickly, we almost always choose the latter.
When I made that transition from the store level to the corporate level it was a dream come true. I’d never seen myself staying as a store manager. Instead, my aspirations were to become a buyer. So when a position as one of our book buyers was offered to me, it felt like I’d won the lottery.
Those of you who are long time listeners know that those feelings of victory were short lived. Just 18 months later I was removed from that position and booted back out to the stores. There were many lessons I learned during that time, some of which I’ve already shared and some which I’ll be sharing later this year.
Once I returned to the stores, I spent over two years in a sort of limbo. While I may have been in limbo, I wasn’t waiting idly by to see what was happening next. I proactively worked on improving my skills and identifying new goals. But that’s not today’s focus.
While I was in that limbo stage, the company would often send me out to new store locations to help set them up. You may recall from episode 643 that our company had a guy named Jason who was the operations manager overseeing all new store development. By this time Jason had been promoted to President and a guy named Greg was overseeing new store setups.
When Greg wasn’t running new store setups, he was running one of our Oklahoma City stores and the company had assigned me to that store. I’d completed some significant education courses in November of 2005 and I was certain that once those courses were complete that the corporate office would be promoting me to a position in the IT department. But those calls never came.
As springtime rolled around, I was growing impatient. One day Jason showed up to our store before opening and began asking me questions about the courses I’d taken and some other things related to the company. He was fairly vague in his info but it was clear he was considering me for…something.
Soon after that he took me to lunch and we discussed things more. He mentioned he was creating a new role at the corporate office that would lead to a new department of the company and I was being considered for it. Obviously, I was very excited!
A couple of months went by and we expanded the company into Colorado Springs. Greg and I spent weeks in the city training the staff and setting up the new store. On one of Jason’s visits he pulled me aside in the stockroom and let me know that I’d been selected to take over the new role. After we finished up in Colorado Springs he’d give me a call. The company had plans to relocate one of our Arkansas stores the following month, but I would not be used for that job due to my new assignment.
How does that saying go? The best laid plans of mice and men…? I forget how it goes from there.
When it came time to assign workers for the Arkansas store relocation, I was on the list. I asked Greg and Jason about it and learned that I’d have to wait longer before the new job was ready. A month later when I returned from Arkansas, the job was still not ready. More waiting. Finally after another month or two, I got the call I’d been waiting for!
Showing up that first day was exhilarating! The next several years of building my team and developing the new department was extremely rewarding…until it wasn’t. I’ve covered this story in a few episodes before so I won’t go into it here, but in September of 2011 events happened that led me to realize my time with the company would be coming to an end.
Six months after that, Jason left the company. Once he left, I felt alone. It was an isolated, difficult time. By the time he left I was already actively planning my exit by building my own company, but it was taking a painfully long time to grow. It seemed like I was trapped.
As I’ve told this story today, I’ve made it seem like the challenging part was only from when I completed my degree until I took over as the ecommerce director. But in reality, the two and a half years between the time I was fired from being a buyer and I was hired as the ecommerce director were an exercise in patience.
Likewise, the stretch of time from when I knew my days were numbered until the day I turned in my resignation was a year and a half long. If you’ve found yourself in a similar situation, you know those days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months, and months feel like years.
Here’s what I learned.
As I look back on those times now, I see so much growth that happened in the waiting. Jean-Jacques Rousseau IS right. Not only is patience bitter but its fruit is truly sweet. Those years between buyer and director shaped me and prepared me for my future. The skills I acquired, the relationships I fostered, and the person I became during that time ended up making me uniquely qualified and prepared for the next phase of my career.
And so it was with those months trying to navigate my departure from the company. I certainly look back on that stretch and wish I’d made better decisions to be more professional and represented myself better even when I was being mistreated. I’m grateful that I look back on that time and have those lessons to pull from it, but throughout that entire process my faith was challenged, my prayer life grew, and I was once again being prepared to have the skills and relationships necessary to navigate the next phase of my career.
Without each of these phases of waiting and learning patience, I would not be the person I am today. I have pulled dozens of episodes with dozens of lessons that I learned through these trials and I wouldn’t go back and change now even if I could.
Yes, they were lonely. Yes, they were frustrating. Yes, it seemed like I’d been forgotten. Yes, it seemed like I was in a tunnel with no light at the end of it. But eventually, when the time was just right, the light did come.
So today’s lesson is this. We will inevitably find ourselves in difficult times with our careers. When we do, seek God first. Ask him for wisdom. Ask him to guide you. Ask him to teach you and give you a heart to learn. And, yes, ask for patience. It will not be easy. But patience is a virtue and virtues are never established or tested in times of comfort. Remember the words of Ovid, “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on September 29th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.