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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, this week I will officially become the parent of two middle schoolers, and I believe if you are learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share lessons I learned from being out of place.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day: Here are some fun facts about animals. Guinea pigs and rabbits can’t sweat, there are more than 50 kinds of kangaroos, and sloths take two weeks to digest their food.
What I leaned yesterday.
Today I want to tell you a story about misfit. Our misfit was born and raised in the north where it is very cold. The town where he grew up was dependent on a single employer and a single industry. So just like everyone else he knew, he was destined to work at the same factory as they were.
While this may seem like a boring, even monotonous way of life, no one seemed to mind. Everyone got along, they all had a really good boss, and they took pleasure in the quality of their work and the impact they were making on the world.
However, our misfit was not happy. He clearly did not fit in with everyone else. The work did not come naturally to him and he found it difficult to do the same tasks as everyone else. One day his father knew that he had to reveal a secret.
The father sat down the misfit and let him know that he was not like everyone else in their town. He was not an elf, he was human. He encouraged his son Buddy to head to New York to find his real father and discover his true place in the world.
Did you see it coming? Did you realize I was setting up the movie Elf? Is that such a great movie?
While the story depicted in the movie is fictional, there are some elements of it that are very relatable, and I’m not just talking about putting syrup on spaghetti.
Have you ever felt like you’re a misfit?
When I started working at the bookstore, I was 18 years old. I had no idea what I wanted to be and I was certain my future was not at the bookstore. The bookstore was a great way to pay my way through college and nothing more.
However, over the next couple of years my opinion changed. I saw the bookstore as a good company with good benefits, good people, good values, and a good future. At some point after I was promoted to the department head of the Bibles and Church Supplies department, I thought it would be great to follow that path to its top. I wanted to be the Bible buyer for the entire company and work at the corporate office.
I kept working hard and hoped that one day I’d have a chance. The jobs at the corporate office were very stable and hard to come by. However, after a few years, the Bible buyer decided to move back to his home state and his position was open. One day I got a call from the guy at the corporate office who would be filling the position, and he wanted to interview me for the spot! My day had come!
I had no idea how many people he interviewed for the position, but I felt like I had a pretty good chance. I waited anxiously for him to call and tell me whether or not I’d gotten the job. What made the wait harder was that I was going out of town on vacation and he would have no way to contact me while I was away. It was a grueling wait.
A few days after I returned I got the call I’d been waiting on. The news was not what I’d hoped for. The job had gone to another person that held my same position at one of the other stores.
I knew the other guy pretty well and I knew he was definitely qualified. Still, the sting of not getting the promotion was painful.
I kept working hard and focused on what I could do to remain in contention for future openings. That journey took me down the road of managing my own store which I’ve spoken about a few times before on this podcast. One day I got a call from the same guy that passed me over for the Bible Buyer position. Four or five years had now gone by and he was looking to add another member to his team. I interviewed again, and this time, I got the job.
I could not have been more excited! I really was not interested in being a store manager. In fact, that was a position that I never wanted to take. I did my best and worked hard while I was in that position, but I was eager to become a buyer. I was eager to get a corporate job. I was eager to get a desk job. I was eager to get a job where I could type away at a computer all day.
This is the point where I start to feel like Buddy. I was like a dog that had finally caught a car. I had no idea what to do with it and it was nothing like I expected.
My new boss and I had an awkward relationship almost from the beginning. He wasn’t personable and rarely spoke. I would try to crack a joke or learn more about him, but my comments fell flat. I felt like he looked at me like I was stupid and it caused me to have severe self confidence issues. My self confidence issues caused me to doubt my decisions, say dumb things, and take too long to complete tasks.
On top of all that, the actual tasks of the job were not what I expected. I really don’t know what I expected. I really had no idea what a buyer did all day and I’d never really tried to find out. All I knew was that the buyers I knew all seemed happy and likeable. They were friendly, professional, and respected. I wanted that.
It turned out that being a buyer involved sitting in a bunch of meetings, looking through a bunch of catalogs, and staring at green bar print outs for hours at a time. It also included things like haggling with vendors to get credits that were owed to our company, trying to figure out which items to drop from our inventory, and which items needed to have price adjustments made.
Of course, it also included really cool perks like having lunch with various authors and getting my hands on books months before they were made public, but those weren’t big enough perks to outweigh all the other things that I didn’t find enjoyable. I was miserable.
I had conversations with some of the other buyers, and it seemed like I was alone. It wasn’t that everyone else thought there job was perfect, but none of them seemed to dislike it as much as I did.
My boss knew I was a misfit too. Not only that, but the quality of my work was sub par. If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while you know what happened next.
One day he called me into his office and told me they were making a change. I was being sent back to work at a store and he was giving my position to someone else.
Here’s what I learned.
Despite the fact that I didn’t like my job, I was not happy about the change. I called up the owner of the company and asked to meet with him and we set up a time to chat. When we met he told me that he was aware of the change that had been made and that he had been aware of it before I was. He explained that I was a misfit.
He didn’t use the word misfit, but that’s essentially what he revealed. He said that the company was like a bus. As the owner of the company, he was the bus driver. All the rest of the seats on the bus were filled by employees all over the corporate office and the store locations throughout the country.
He explained that when I was a store manager I was in a seat that was a good fit. The company had seen significant growth from that store while I was in charge of that seat. So they made a decision to put me in a different seat. However, that change had not been good. The company didn’t want to lose me. That is, they didn’t want to kick me off the bus, they just wanted to get me back in the right seat. If they could get me in the right seat, all of us would benefit.
I have to admit, when he explained it that way I knew he was right.
There’s some really amazing stuff that happened after this. If you’ve not heard that part of the story, check out Stuff I Learned Yesterday episodes 6, 84, and 212.
What would have happened if my boss hadn’t made the decision to replace me? I would have kept on hating my job. I would have kept trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. I would have continued to bang my head against a wall. I would have continued to come home frustrated, dejected, and wiped of confidence.
Did you hear that?
I was coming home most nights feeling frustrated, dejected, and wiped of confidence. And yet I know that I would have continued to show up to the job day after day if he had not made the decision to move in a different direction.
Just like Buddy the elf, we are not all created the same. We are not all gifted to do the same things in the same way. They guy that was originally hired as the Bible buyer instead of me was a fantastic buyer. He was a perfect fit for it.
When I was let go, it helped me see that I was made for something different. Not something better, as there was nothing wrong with what I was doing. No, I was made for something different.
Are you frustrated, dejected, or wiped of confidence? Do you feel like buddy the elf? Are you a misfit?
That’s okay. Being a misfit is not bad. Being a misfit simply means that you were designed for something different. Maybe you don’t know what else to do. I totally know how you feel. However, we both know that staying where you are and doing the same thing you’ve been doing is not the answer.
Take some time to seriously evaluate yourself. What do you enjoy doing? If you could do or study anything, what would it be? What is the easiest, clearest step that you can take today that will move you toward that thing?
Take it. TAKE IT!
Then take the next step. Keep in mind that sometimes we can’t see more than one step ahead at a time. But you’ll never see step 2 until you take step 1.
You don’t have to be a misfit anymore.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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