All good here… enjoying the British Summer (NOT!).

I don’t know if it’s just in the UK we’ve issues with ‘failure’… I believe it’s probably most western societies where the emphasis (to external peers) is placed upon what you have and what you do. Changing someone’s job title can someone keep them in a job for another 2 years even without a pay rise or real promotion. People like to be recognised and in order to be recognised for what you’ve achieved there need to be recognisable benchmarks.

Even if you go off and do your own thing people will ask you about turnover (it’s amazing how many people will ask us if we make a profit when you wouldn’t dare dream of asking someone how much they earned) or how ‘satisfied’ you are. People WILL compare their life with yours to see whose measures up better and it takes a confident person to let that go in pursuit of ideals and values.

Do you know what… and it’s awful to admit this… it takes a lot to go off and do your own thing. Not only do you need the desire and the drive (which some people just don’t have) you also need to carry on in the face of adversity, to believe in what you’re doing so much that it doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down you just get up and keep going.

This is why Esc offers such a great ‘halfway house’ for a lot of people. They get to move out of the corporate world and go and work for other people who have values / morals and are doing ‘good’ work BUT they don’t have to start their own company or support themselves financially. The difficulty with moving jobs from the corporate world into something more worthwhile (and this comes full circle) is that you then limit yourself financially so going off and setting up something on your own, for most people, actually gets further away.

Not sure if I’ve gone off on a tangent here…

Lee

In terms of location – hopefully you’ll be pleased to hear that we are designing the new site (currently under construction) to be far more relevant for people no matter what their location.

Watch this space and thanks for the feedback!
Cheers,
Rob

1) Guilt
Every day here in Australia we hear about job cuts both locally and abroad. Youth unemployment has topped 50% in Spain and Greece. I’ve been fortunate enough to secure a comfortable job and advance quite quickly. I’m sure many others have experienced this feeling of shame – that we are being ungrateful. We are lucky enough to have a job at a time when so many others are struggling and comprimising to make ends meet, yet we are still restless.

2) Location
I think that this is linked to the abundance of opportunities mentioned above. Browsing ESC it’s easy to be inspired by the plethora of cool start-up roles or interesting social opportunities – though the reality is most of these are based in London and New York. As highlighted above, these opportunities generate hundreds and thousands of responses, and are extremely competitive. Often, it is easier to find a role through networking. It is hard to do this from the other side of the world.

I think the reality for many of us is having to take the plunge and move overseas and hope that the timing is right to secure an ESC-type role. This relocation risk is expensive and daunting, which probably keeps a lot of us in our corporate jobs.

I think this could be one of the interesting challenges for ESC going forward. This is a global community – yet still many of the roles rely on networking. How can we facilitate this online? How can democratise the process so that the role goes to the most qualified candidate irrespective of current location?

Sorry for heading off on a tangent! Thanks again for providing the inspiration for all of us out there still in the corporate world!

Thanks for a great comment (and thanks to your Mum!). I really like the Dissatisfaction angle. We’ve got a section in the book draft called ‘Beware Comfortable Cruising’ – and in it we’d like to explore the idea of being somewhere between satisfied and dissatisfied. Our theory is that many of us spend a lot of time in that middle zone.

Another phenomenon which a surprising amount of our interviewees have shared with us is the fact that often it takes a personal tragedy or near-tragedy to shock people out of their apathy and decide that they need to make big changes in their lives. Perhaps that’s because it’s easy for dissatisfaction to be dormant for a long time? You know something isn’t right but you tell yourself… it’ll get better, this is a good job, I’m being ungrateful, I have no good alternatives currently, etc.

Thanks for the good luck!
Rob

My Mum (thanks Mum!) passed on what I think is a great formula for figuring out if you can make a change. Change takes three things: Vision, Plan, and Dissatisfaction. Give yourself a mark out of 10 for each of these things, and then multiply them to give yourself a mark out of 1000. If you have a great vision, and a good detailed plan of how to make it happen, but are not actually annoyed enough with your present situation then you might only gain a mark of 100-200/1000 which indicates you are unlikely to make the change happen. I like this because it reflects my experience of making any changes: you have to be dissatisfied enough with the status quo to really kick things off.

We moved from Sydney (Aus) to the Pyrenees (France) where my husband is from and I remember the defining moments of the decision – I hated the traffic once I had children and couldn’t avoid peak hour, I disliked the social positioning associated with corporate/city life, I couldn’t see how we could manage a family life in any sane way while both working.

Good luck with the book.

Sian

That’s really interesting that you sometimes feel the urge to give people the back story (and honest of you to say so). You’re spot on about the ego driving many of these decisions.

None of us want to be seen as failures or not fulfilling our potential. But ultimately we have to judge ourselves by our own standards and values rather than external ones. So hard!

Why do you think we have such issues with failure in the UK? We’re all terrified of it (at least I know I am)!

Reminds me of this one-liner from Gaping Void: “The best way to get approval is not to need it.” http://gapingvoid.com/2004/10/19/the-best-way-to-get-approval-is-not-to-need-it/

Cheers,
Rob

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with earning lots of money. It’s just that ideally it comes with fulfilling work. And all too often people have the first without the second and before they know it they’re stuck.

The crazy thing is you’re not actually stuck… you just feel stuck because of the social / personal pressures mentioned above – as well as the natural unwillingness for your income to drop.

Presumably you’re much happier now even though you’re earning less?

Congrats on your own escape and start-up. Would you be up for sharing your story with us on Escape? Just ping adele@escapethecity.org an email if so.

All the best,
Rob

You’re absolutely right. It’s so easy to completely forget what happiness is. I remember being so clear on it when I was a student… a few years into the corporate world and I really had to remind myself what my core values were and what really makes me feel alive. I’ve had similar upswells of happiness and feelings of alignment and they’re never in a cubicle, in a suit, or in any of the situations that you outline above (buying stuff, consuming stuff, being in the right places, etc). Would love to use some of this in the book… thanks for the ideas.

Rob

I think you’re spot on regarding risk. The past few years in financial services have shown that corporate job security is often an illusion. Credit Crunch / Lehmans…

And yet it is so easy to decide that big career transitions are too risky… when (as you say) sometimes the risks of not making a decision are actually way greater. I.e. wasting your life / waking up one day and realising you missed your chances!

We need to reframe the way we assess risk. It’s hard. Being ‘out there’ away from the duvet of the corporate world is damn scary. Accountability, responsibility, and relying directly on yourself for your income. Scary but worth it.

Fancy sharing your recent experiences with the Escape community? We’d love to feature you. If so, just drop adele@escapethecity.org an email.

Cheers,
Rob

Go to as many events as you can.
http://www.meetup.com/
http://generalassemb.ly/education/?where=london

Follow people you are interested in on Twitter and read their blogs. Do you have an RSS feed? http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/?tab=my

Approach people directly and ask for advice and/or help. It’s amazing how generous some people are with their time if you ask them in the right way.

Good luck!

Rob

I worked for nearly two years in an investment bank (2007 – 2009) but only one bonus cycle. I intentionally quit before my 2nd bonus was announced, otherwise I would have been locked-in until pay date and potentially locked-in indefinitely waiting for ‘just one more bonus’.

I left to set-up my own business and have earned peanuts compared to banking, but I’m glad I escaped the city before my life was on an irreversible track of black cabs, blow dries and Birkin handbags.

Personally I’ve found that we’re very used to our egos making the choices for us. Our egos tell us that in order to ‘be’ someone in the world we have to be in the right job, earn the right salary and live in the right area.

Egos are a good thing, the ego is usually the part of us that got us into university and through that MBA when we thought we’d never go back to studying again; however when you’ve been in that world for so long, surrounded by other people whose egos are making their decisions, it’s very difficult to break out and realise that what we do and where we live are just material things and they never will be WHO we are.

Walking away from all that is a leap of faith and there’s still a part of me that now I run a guest house wants to tell guests that I didn’t always cook breakfasts and make beds, that I used to be ‘important’. I have to laugh at that part of me now, the part that thought and cared about what other people thought and cared about me.

We get stuck in thinking that if we walk away from careers certain options will be lost to us and I guess that kind of corporate culture has been developed over centuries.

The reality is that when we’re in one place we can only see one horizon, we have to take a step in one direction – any direction – to see a different horizon and a different set of options. I certainly don’t think that I’ll be running a guest house for the rest of my life but the reality of this escape is that now I can see all sorts of opportunities that I couldn’t see out of my office window in Soho.

Once you’ve done it you realise how easy it is and you’re (certainly I am) much more likely to do it again. Watch this space

I don’t think ‘knowing’ the answer is even possible when you don’t know what’s out there – personally I think it’s so important just to explore and to keep making time to meet like-minded people – often that’s where the best opportunities and projects end up coming from.